The Glade 4.0

My vote is for leave. I think it will cause some short term market volatility, but in the long term it's better for Britain to leave the heavily bureaucratic EU. Just look at how well Switzerland is doing, and they aren't a member.

Also leave.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

If the UK were a cohesive whole, like Switzerland, I'd agree.

It's not.

This vote to leave means within the next 5 years, the UK will no longer exist.

England will be an insignificant micro-country with a shite economy. Scotland will be about the same, but it will be an EU member. Ireland will be United. Wales will be a third world shithole. (Okay, that didn't really change.)

I know why they voted the way they did, but they've also essentially voted to rip their own country apart in the process.

From a North American perspective, we're about to see our most powerful military ally in Europe disintegrate. There is no more "United Kingdom."

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Things are not looking good for the Islamic world either. Britain's vote to leave largely due to requirements on accepting immigrants is going to force the other EU governments to take a hard line stance on refugees. At that point, how many friends do they have left? No matter who wins the Presidency here, they're getting someone incredibly hostile as well. Hilary's foreign policy is very right wing and w all know Trump's stance.

Spain will almost certainly block an independent Scotland from joining the EU. They do not want Catalonia getting ideas about their own independence.

Scotland already got to vote once on independence.

In any case, there's already demands for votes in a number of other countries. There's a good chance of their not being an EU for much longer.

Either way, this is a good thing. An unelected bureaucracy slowly amalgamating ostensibly independent countries into a single state while pretending not to is probably even worse than outright dictatorship, especially when it is intent on importing barbarians and imposing them as a burden on its citizens.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

That won't stop the SNP for calling another referendum in the next couple years... and Sinn Fein is already calling for one in N.I. They have the republic to its south as a fallback point, so it doesn't even have to go it alone like Scotland would.

Best case scenario, now, is other major EU member states follow the UK (I've heard France and the Netherlands have large demographics calling for referendums as well), the EU fractures, and they need to form a new economic alliance with more autonomy for its members.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Hey, it's worked for America!

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

We aren't a collection of independent countries though, the fantasies of libertarians notwithstanding.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Eh. Independent country / sovereign state... Potayto / potahto.

I mean, we're not a collection of independent countries anymore. But back in the days of the founding fathers and early Presidents, governors regularly met with ambassadors and foreign leaders, etc.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

We're not back in those days, either, and I'm pretty sure that when a foreign leader comes to a state the governor is often among those that meet them.

States are sovereign states, not countries, not nation states. Those days are gone. They aren't coming back, and if they did we'd replace one set of problems with another.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I disagree. For example, look at Singapore, a city state. It's consistently ranked as one of the 5 most important economic centers of the world. NYC and London are typically tied for #1.

I think what some politicians are really scared of is that Brexit will prove to be a good thing for Britain, because then other countries will see how beneficial it was and follow suit.

It will be a good thing for Britain ... if it doesn't break up Britain.. Also, if another major EU country breaks away, it is much more likely to go well for Britain. If they get into an adversarial relationship with the rest of the EU, out won't be good.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

What exactly is Scotland bringing to the table these days? Are they a net tax contributor, or a net tax liability? Much as it pains the second-largest part of my ancestry to admit, I'm not sure what Scotland is doing these days beyond demanding social benefits and providing a harbor for Vanguards. They present every appearance of wanting to essentially be Greece or Chicago, spending a ton of money and then demanding someone else bail them out; if they want to leave, assuming there's an EU to join, they may not be welcome - either because of aforementioned Spanish objections, or because Germany and France already have enough anchors weighing them down.

Or maybe they plan to join NATO, have a two-battalion army, contribute 10 medics and a psychologist to every international peacekeeping mission in the world, purchase half a dozen surplus F-16s and 3 coast-guard cutters, found some shitty International Racial Court of Justice Peace and War Crime Badness and then ***** about US defense policy while expecting an equal seat at the table like every other two-bit European country that's figured out how to milk the cow.

(Don't laugh. Canada is getting shafted on these deals too).)

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Scotland has a very high per capita GDP... Not quite at the level of England, but still making them one of the richer countries in Europe. Scotland isn't hurting, economically.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Not quite at the level of England... again, what are the respective tax ratios?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm no expert in UK tax systems (I barely understand my own), but from what I can tell, they pay the same rate of tax as everyone else in the UK, but 10% of their tax money goes specifically to the Scottish Parliament.

https://www.gov.uk/scottish-rate-income ... w-it-works

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

A fractured Europe. Increase in nationalism. Increase in xenophobia. Is it time to invade France again?

Yes, only now the Germans consider themselves too enlightened to be the ones to do it.

My money's on a bunch of Russians with Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian passports migrating to France, and then everybody acting surprised when a couple ships with tanks show up on the coast and they all climb in. Kind of like the Ukraine, but simultaneously more and less subtle due to the lack of a shared border and Putin's emboldened reaction to all the Ukrainian enabling.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

France isn't going to get invaded by an outside army. They're getting invaded by muslims, and we'll wake up one day to discover France is now governed by Islam and it has control of the French deterrent (which, by the way, is why no one's ever invading France conventionally again.)

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Except France has one of the more anti-EU and anti-immigration attitudes in Europe. They likely won't be in the EU long, nor will they be taking any more Islamic immigrants afterward.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

The birth rate of the ones already there, however, is much higher than that of those of French ancestry.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

And in ten generations , they'll be a significantly higher percentage of the population, except after two or three generations they will be indistinguishably french.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

All indications are that they probably won't. The days of immigrants assimilating are past. It's the same problem as here - immigrants expect to re-create their own countries, not adopt new ones.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This is just wrong. Every major city older than about 50 years has "china town", "little italy", "leprechaun land", or some other variation. This has ALWAYS been the case, and guess what? For the most part they all assimilated after a couple of generations.

This is nothing new - it's exactly the same as it has always been. Anytime there's a mass migration, there's pockets of sub civilizations - that changes quickly over time.