Best Of

Slightly puzzled by header.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/13/dairy-farmers-worker-shortage-threatening-uk-food-security

"Five in six farmers who have looked for workers said they have received very few or zero applications from qualified people for their job vacancies, according to a survey of dairy producers by Arla, the UK’s largest dairy cooperative and the owner of the Lurpak and Cravendale brands.

The fifth annual poll of Arla’s 1,900 British dairy farmers has highlighted the worsening struggle to find workers with the right skills and experience, with 79% of farmers highlighting this problem in 2021, rising to 84% this year.

The difficulties in hiring staff had grown worse since Brexit and the pandemic, milk producers reported, as the combination of the end of free movement for EU workers and other economic factors since Covid have made it harder to find suitable staff, while there has been a similar story across the whole of the agricultural sector."

too much like hard work for the bone idle

Good afternoon

As I commented yesterday, my granddaughter with her new degree from Leeds University has applied for 60 jobs and is now on UC and none of her fellow students have manged to find a position

It does raise the question how much a degree is worth, when you can go to a FE and have possibly better prospects and no student debt

Best of luck to her with job hunting, but it's hardly realistic to judge the value or otherwise of a degree when only about six weeks have passed since students finished final exams. "Was it worth it?" is a question that can only meaningfully be judged over decades rather than weeks.

Yes we measure employment after 9 months of having left uni for a more realistic indicator.

Slightly puzzled by header.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/13/dairy-farmers-worker-shortage-threatening-uk-food-security

"Five in six farmers who have looked for workers said they have received very few or zero applications from qualified people for their job vacancies, according to a survey of dairy producers by Arla, the UK’s largest dairy cooperative and the owner of the Lurpak and Cravendale brands.

The fifth annual poll of Arla’s 1,900 British dairy farmers has highlighted the worsening struggle to find workers with the right skills and experience, with 79% of farmers highlighting this problem in 2021, rising to 84% this year.

The difficulties in hiring staff had grown worse since Brexit and the pandemic, milk producers reported, as the combination of the end of free movement for EU workers and other economic factors since Covid have made it harder to find suitable staff, while there has been a similar story across the whole of the agricultural sector."

This is part of the British disease right there. Employers expect people to be trained at someone else's expense, and aren't willing to do the training themselves.

Who is going to train workers on dairy farms if not dairy farmers?

Good afternoon

As I commented yesterday, my granddaughter with her new degree from Leeds University has applied for 60 jobs and is now on UC and none of her fellow students have manged to find a position

It does raise the question how much a degree is worth, when you can go to a FE and have possibly better prospects and no student debt

Best of luck to her with job hunting, but it's hardly realistic to judge the value or otherwise of a degree when only about six weeks have passed since students finished final exams. "Was it worth it?" is a question that can only meaningfully be judged over decades rather than weeks.

There's a real and immediate question about the pace of technological change, its effects on future employment prospects, and the value of a traditional three year degree.
Frankly, I'm not sure I'd gamble tens of thousands, and three years of my life on it, if I were a school leaver today.

Yeah, my sister was asking me about whether she should put her daughter into code camp this summer as she thinks it might be a good skill to learn. I said do it if you think she might find it fun, not for the skills because coding as a skill is very quickly becoming devalued. It's a great mindset to learn but the actual hard skills behind writing code are just nowhere near as marketable as they were even 3 years ago, especially at entry level.

Agentic AI is ceratinly changing the way we write software, but there will be a need for people who can code for quite a while yet. I'm not sure how much of a gain in productivity AI is actually bringing. Personlly, I'm still trying to find the sweet spot in between writing everying myself and letting AI write it and then trying to understand and debug the unstructured spaghetti that it often generates. To trick seems to be to proceed in small steps, being sure to tell the AI exactly what it is that you want, but this can take almost as long as writing it yourself.

https://www.lancashire.ac.uk/news/ancient-dna-west-african-ancestry

Ancient DNA analysis uncovers evidence for West African ancestry in two unconnected burials from seventh-century-AD England.

In both individuals, their African ancestors were recent, likely at the grandparent level.

Whilst one cemetery showed royal connections to continental Europe, the other was on the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon world.
This is the first evidence for genetic connections between Britain and Africa during the Early Middle Ages.

Immigrants, coming over here, getting buried in the 7th century...

Or even earlier, like Barates the Palmyrene Geordie.

https://blog.twmuseums.org.uk/the-regina-tombstone/

"This is the tombstone of Regina from the tribe of the Catuvellauni, freedwoman and wife of Barates from Palmyra. She came from southern England and he came from Syria and they ended up at South Shields."

Oh I bet she was impressed by that...

Might not have had any choice in the matter. If she was the freedwoman of Barates she'd have been his slave to begin with.

Slightly puzzled by header.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/13/dairy-farmers-worker-shortage-threatening-uk-food-security

"Five in six farmers who have looked for workers said they have received very few or zero applications from qualified people for their job vacancies, according to a survey of dairy producers by Arla, the UK’s largest dairy cooperative and the owner of the Lurpak and Cravendale brands.

The fifth annual poll of Arla’s 1,900 British dairy farmers has highlighted the worsening struggle to find workers with the right skills and experience, with 79% of farmers highlighting this problem in 2021, rising to 84% this year.

The difficulties in hiring staff had grown worse since Brexit and the pandemic, milk producers reported, as the combination of the end of free movement for EU workers and other economic factors since Covid have made it harder to find suitable staff, while there has been a similar story across the whole of the agricultural sector."

And this is what I think needs to be done for everyone on unemployment benefits, these are jobs that need doing, they pay the minimum wage so do them. I don't think university graduates or anyone under the age of 25 should be eligible for unemployment benefits, if they can go out and socialise they can work in the field or milk cows in a barn or work in a warehouse. It may not be what they want to do but it's still paid work which is better than sitting at home on the dole.

Milking cows is not a trivial thing to do. Really takes time to learn. Personally if I were to become Defra Secretary I would line up all the staff and see how many could plough a straight furrow, milk a cow and shear a tup. I can't do all three but can do two of them.

Good afternoon

As I commented yesterday, my granddaughter with her new degree from Leeds University has applied for 60 jobs and is now on UC and none of her fellow students have manged to find a position

It does raise the question how much a degree is worth, when you can go to a FE and have possibly better prospects and no student debt

Best of luck to her with job hunting, but it's hardly realistic to judge the value or otherwise of a degree when only about six weeks have passed since students finished final exams. "Was it worth it?" is a question that can only meaningfully be judged over decades rather than weeks.

(i) You don't enjoy it, can't get any job with prospects at the end of it, waste of time.

(ii) You love it, the study and the environment, make some great friends and contacts, leads straight into a terrific career that suits you.

Apart from these extremes I think it's hard to ever answer the question "was it worth it?".

https://www.lancashire.ac.uk/news/ancient-dna-west-african-ancestry

Ancient DNA analysis uncovers evidence for West African ancestry in two unconnected burials from seventh-century-AD England.

In both individuals, their African ancestors were recent, likely at the grandparent level.

Whilst one cemetery showed royal connections to continental Europe, the other was on the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon world.
This is the first evidence for genetic connections between Britain and Africa during the Early Middle Ages.

Immigrants, coming over here, getting buried in the 7th century...

Or even earlier, like Barates the Palmyrene Geordie.

https://blog.twmuseums.org.uk/the-regina-tombstone/

"This is the tombstone of Regina from the tribe of the Catuvellauni, freedwoman and wife of Barates from Palmyra. She came from southern England and he came from Syria and they ended up at South Shields."

Oh I bet she was impressed by that...