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Leaving the sinking ship? – politicalbetting.com

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  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 45,662
    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    But as you said the acerage person can't do the job - however there are probably twice or three times as many software developers required as exist in the world.

    My point is that the demand for software developers utterly swamps the supply of them and that isn't going to be solved because most people can't think through a problem logically enough to work out how to reimplement it.
    Rubbish. 99.99% of people competently speak at least one human language, which is way more difficult than coding in C, and .0001% (enough) can code an AI which can code in C anyway.
    Ummm: all you are doing is moving the problem. Someone has to talk to the AI in a language the AI understands, and make sure that the AI understands all the edge cases, and is aware that the following API breaks if handed Unicode text, and that AI writes the correct documentation in a format another AI at another company understands.

    But yes, other than that, spot on.
    But it gets easier with every move of the problem. It is easier to tell a WYSIWYG editor to write you some html than it is to write the html. And so on.
    Nobody writes HTML in a WYSIWYG editor.

    I'm guessing, and I could be wrong here, that you might not work in tech.
    What?

    I have personally turned a cottage industry into a £4m turnover company using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_GoLive. If that isn't writing html in a WYSIWYG editor, what is?
    Didn't Adobe discontinue GoLive in about 2005?
    Yes, and it wasn't an Adobe product while I was doing this, it was GoLive CyberStudio. And £4m was a lot of money in those days.
    More seriously: the world has changed in the last two decades. In the old days, websites were individually coded pages of HTML (albeit still usually depending on CSS, which limited the use of tools like GoLive). Now, almost every page is dynamic in various ways: it will be pulling in information from various external sources, and it will need to contain enough logic to display appropriately, whether viewed on a phone or a computer. It will need to handle touch gracefully. Etc.

    This means that the hardcoded static HTML page with no external dependencies has - basically - disappeared.
    The requirement to hand write the skeleton of the page in decent HTML is still there. And understand the interaction between the static and dynamic elements is actually far more skilled than understanding flat HTML.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 68,392

    ydoethur said:

    ydoethur said:

    Culture secretary and Johnson loyalist Nadine Dorries is doing the morning broadcast round tomorrow

    https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1489311564704407564

    Tweet has been deleted. Maybe Nadine's done a runner?
    Changing picture: Greg Hands, energy minister, is doing the government's morning broadcast round.

    Culture secretary Nadine Dorries lined up for Saturday.


    https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1489318291520774153
    Dangerous strategy. Energy is positive only 50% of the time.
    Don't be so negative.
    Obviously it's a highly charged subject. But with an energy minister, you never understand what they're saying as around one third is lost in transmission.
    I thought DC was more efficient in his transmission than that?
    Hard to tell, given pretty much nothing he says is worth listening to anyway.
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 78,053
    edited February 2022
    I have no idea, but do the likes of SquareSpace who are effectively a modern replacement for WYSIWYG HTML editors do much business?
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,686
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    But as you said the acerage person can't do the job - however there are probably twice or three times as many software developers required as exist in the world.

    My point is that the demand for software developers utterly swamps the supply of them and that isn't going to be solved because most people can't think through a problem logically enough to work out how to reimplement it.
    Rubbish. 99.99% of people competently speak at least one human language, which is way more difficult than coding in C, and .0001% (enough) can code an AI which can code in C anyway.
    Ummm: all you are doing is moving the problem. Someone has to talk to the AI in a language the AI understands, and make sure that the AI understands all the edge cases, and is aware that the following API breaks if handed Unicode text, and that AI writes the correct documentation in a format another AI at another company understands.

    But yes, other than that, spot on.
    But it gets easier with every move of the problem. It is easier to tell a WYSIWYG editor to write you some html than it is to write the html. And so on.
    Nobody writes HTML in a WYSIWYG editor.

    I'm guessing, and I could be wrong here, that you might not work in tech.
    What?

    I have personally turned a cottage industry into a £4m turnover company using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_GoLive. If that isn't writing html in a WYSIWYG editor, what is?
    Didn't Adobe discontinue GoLive in about 2005?
    Yes, and it wasn't an Adobe product while I was doing this, it was GoLive CyberStudio. And £4m was a lot of money in those days.
    More seriously: the world has changed in the last two decades. In the old days, websites were individually coded pages of HTML (albeit still usually depending on CSS, which limited the use of tools like GoLive). Now, almost every page is dynamic in various ways: it will be pulling in information from various external sources, and it will need to contain enough logic to display appropriately, whether viewed on a phone or a computer. It will need to handle touch gracefully. Etc.

    This means that the hardcoded static HTML page with no external dependencies has - basically - disappeared.
    As an aside, this has meant that you have seen this industry upskill itself too. In the old days, if you could use GoLive or Front Page or Dreamweaver, you could call yourself a web developer.

    Now, if you want to be a web developer, you will need to know CSS/JQuery/etc. You will need to be - basically - a computer programmer.
    One of our competitors had a handy directory listing of all their major clients on what I suspect wasn't supposed to be a publicly facing website. A simple get request and JQuery later we had a full list and fuzzy match to our zoominfo table. Someone was manually transcribing them from the website into a Google sheet with copying and pasting. Lol.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 68,392

    In all the excitement, did we do this, by the way? I can't tell if it's serious or an early April Fool's.

    'Common sense' to cut classroom doors to curb Covid

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-60246163

    Fucking hell.

    And I thought Gavin Williamson was stupid...
  • Options
    Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 34,547
    The line being pushed by pro-Boris Johnson Tory MPs on WhatsApp tonight. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1489337562921684995/photo/1
  • Options
    tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,521
    Also, I see the Washington Football Team are now the Washington Commanders.

    What a terrible name.
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 12,036

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.

    But let me ask you a question.

    Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?

    This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
    Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.

    Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
    Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market
    Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue

    Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
    You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
    I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.

    What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
    And your point is? ‘Twas ever thus. Given the choice between being a monastic scribe sitting in a freezing cell, preserving knowledge for posterity in the absence of any form of information technology bar quill and parchment, and a feudal lord living it up with wine and wenches galore at the expense of my peasants, I know which one I’d take.
  • Options
    On topic:

    Having listened to this evening's news on R4, one goal of Brexit has been achieved. We have gone back in time to a era where

    - The UK was not in the EU
    - Government on the edge of collapse after a couple of years in office
    - Inflation problems
    - Energy price shocks
    - US and USSR aka Russia facing off against each other
    - BoE worried about rapidly rising inflation
    - Problems getting people to go to work (WFH rather than strikes)

    As usual, the incompetents failed to hit their target of 1957 and put us in 1975.
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,686

    I have no idea, but do the likes of SquareSpace who are effectively a modern replacement for WYSIWYG HTML editors do much business?

    Yes, websites as a service, Wex is the other one I think.
  • Options
    IanB2IanB2 Posts: 48,149
    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.

    But let me ask you a question.

    Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?

    This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
    Which ever one offers the degree apprenticeship so you don't end up £50k in debt with little to show for it.
    We have a lot to learn from the Germans, the Swiss and the Singaporeans, who do such a great job upskilling their populations via sensible vocational training.
    The days when the Swiss’ main skill was jumping out from behind a fir tree to ambush some pilgrims trying to traverse the mountains are long gone?
  • Options
    pigeonpigeon Posts: 4,490
    Scott_xP said:

    In all the excitement, did we do this, by the way? I can't tell if it's serious or an early April Fool's.

    'Common sense' to cut classroom doors to curb Covid

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-60246163

    Are they not fire doors?
    Yes

    Lots of people have been asking why not just prop classroom doors open to improve air flow - rather than cut the bottom off them (one measure proposed by Scot Gov).

    I asked this Q of Nicola Sturgeon's official spokesman today at media briefing after #FMQs. Here's the response:


    https://twitter.com/ChrisMusson/status/1489249739476389896/photo/1

    🚨BREAKING 🚨

    Engineers in Scotland have invented a door that can be adjusted to allow airflow as desired by the user.

    The senior engineer said, "this scientific breakthrough, which makes use of hinges, will prevent the bottoms of doors across the country being sawed off".

    https://twitter.com/GlasgowGuy2015/status/1489307117718753289/photo/1
    The SNP in January:
    Let's force everyone in Scotland to install linked fire alarms in their homes at a significant cost

    The SNP in February:
    Let’s chop the bottom off fire doors in schools rendering them useless in the event of fire


    https://twitter.com/Jen4Scot/status/1489156601332355076
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 45,662

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.

    But let me ask you a question.

    Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?

    This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
    Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.

    Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
    Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market
    Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue

    Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
    You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
    I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.

    What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
    ....And then you get the collision of that kind of entitlement with the realisation that the "geeks" are getting big money.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 68,392

    On topic:

    Having listened to this evening's news on R4, one goal of Brexit has been achieved. We have gone back in time to a era where

    - The UK was not in the EU
    - Government on the edge of collapse after a couple of years in office
    - Inflation problems
    - Energy price shocks
    - US and USSR aka Russia facing off against each other
    - BoE worried about rapidly rising inflation
    - Problems getting people to go to work (WFH rather than strikes)

    As usual, the incompetents failed to hit their target of 1957 and put us in 1975.

    We joined what became the EU in 1973.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 68,392
    tlg86 said:

    Also, I see the Washington Football Team are now the Washington Commanders.

    What a terrible name.

    Will they issue Bonds to fund themselves?
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 45,662

    In all the excitement, did we do this, by the way? I can't tell if it's serious or an early April Fool's.

    'Common sense' to cut classroom doors to curb Covid

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-60246163

    Are they not fire doors?
    In many cases yes. For some reason people building schools these days like a stripped out, bare aesthetic (not much to burn) and fire doors all over the place. I can't think why....
  • Options
    CookieCookie Posts: 12,024
    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 33,196

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.

    But let me ask you a question.

    Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?

    This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
    Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.

    Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
    Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market
    Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue

    Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
    You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
    I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.

    What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
    Well there could be one of those coming vacant soon.
  • Options
    FarooqFarooq Posts: 12,172
    tlg86 said:

    kle4 said:

    tlg86 said:

    Completely off-topic, but I know there are some NFL fans on here:

    https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/03/nfl-tanking-allegations-owner-payments-brian-flores-hue-jackson

    The NFL currently has just one Black head coach in Mike Tomlin. One, despite 70% of NFL players being Black.

    This argument annoys me in soccer, but it seriously boils my piss with American football. Here are the NFL head coaches:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_National_Football_League_head_coaches

    Of the 27 head coaches (there are five vacancies), only four had significant NFL careers:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Rivera
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Reich
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Vrabel
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Campbell

    The rest started coaching soon after leaving school/college. Indeed, the one black head coach - Mike Tomlin - did precisely that:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Tomlin

    If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.

    I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
    Power and pace are important for many of the positions.
    So Black people are more powerful and and faster than White people?
  • Options
    MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 26,138
    Scott_xP said:

    Roger said:

    I noticed that Johnson dressed up as a train driver tonight. Maybe he's a pervy strippergrams for people with unusual tastes?

    In Blackpool. Instead of taking the train there, he flew on the private jet
    Making the most of it while he can. Bless
  • Options

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.

    But let me ask you a question.

    Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?

    This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
    Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.

    Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
    Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market
    Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue

    Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
    You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
    I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.

    What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
    Well there could be one of those coming vacant soon.
    And plenty of dummies queuing up for it.
  • Options
    tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,521
    Farooq said:

    tlg86 said:

    kle4 said:

    tlg86 said:

    Completely off-topic, but I know there are some NFL fans on here:

    https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/03/nfl-tanking-allegations-owner-payments-brian-flores-hue-jackson

    The NFL currently has just one Black head coach in Mike Tomlin. One, despite 70% of NFL players being Black.

    This argument annoys me in soccer, but it seriously boils my piss with American football. Here are the NFL head coaches:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_National_Football_League_head_coaches

    Of the 27 head coaches (there are five vacancies), only four had significant NFL careers:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Rivera
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Reich
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Vrabel
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Campbell

    The rest started coaching soon after leaving school/college. Indeed, the one black head coach - Mike Tomlin - did precisely that:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Tomlin

    If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.

    I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
    Power and pace are important for many of the positions.
    So Black people are more powerful and and faster than White people?
    It's to do with fast twitch muscle fibres, I believe.
  • Options
    Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 34,547
    Shadow whipping operation in full swing to try and gloss over Munira Mirza’s unexpected resignation. Here’s the party line - and who’s tweeting it - at Chris Pincher’s request*

    *individually crafted tweets preferred to retweets, he told MPs tonight https://twitter.com/AVMikhailova/status/1489339772791365637/photo/1
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 26,010

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    But as you said the acerage person can't do the job - however there are probably twice or three times as many software developers required as exist in the world.

    My point is that the demand for software developers utterly swamps the supply of them and that isn't going to be solved because most people can't think through a problem logically enough to work out how to reimplement it.
    Rubbish. 99.99% of people competently speak at least one human language, which is way more difficult than coding in C, and .0001% (enough) can code an AI which can code in C anyway.
    Ummm: all you are doing is moving the problem. Someone has to talk to the AI in a language the AI understands, and make sure that the AI understands all the edge cases, and is aware that the following API breaks if handed Unicode text, and that AI writes the correct documentation in a format another AI at another company understands.

    But yes, other than that, spot on.
    But it gets easier with every move of the problem. It is easier to tell a WYSIWYG editor to write you some html than it is to write the html. And so on.
    Nobody writes HTML in a WYSIWYG editor.

    I'm guessing, and I could be wrong here, that you might not work in tech.
    I knew an academic that insisted on only using emacs for everything. I don't just mean writing some c++ code, I mean literally everything, from code to diagrams to slides. Any talk of you could use Illustrator or Powerpoint for that, was met with a reaction akin to suggesting their mother was a dockside hooker.
    At the other extreme I've seen people (not naming names but Accenture) use Powerpoint to project plans because they didn't have Project...
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 45,662
    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    The problem was that you went into mainframe programming..... COBOL. A noble trade, but one that was fading already at that time. And was dominated by what management saw as simple task which could waterfall managed, and outsourced easily.

    I went another way, along with many of my fellows - C++, then Java/C# and headed into finance.

    The IT world outside finance has caught up - it used to be double the rate of pay in the banks. Now it is fairly even.
  • Options
    rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 54,783
    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    There's a lot of randomness. A friend of mine learned some obscure old database system in his first job out of university. And has earned a six figure salary as a contractor since.

    Other friends ended up with skills for which there was no demand, and struggled to find work.

  • Options
    rkrkrkrkrkrk Posts: 7,996
    MrEd said:

    Re Johnson, seriously most of the people won’t give a fuck about the aides.

    To misquote Sherlock Holmes, what’s more interesting is the dogs that are not barking, namely that (so far) few of the ERG / anti-lockdown / Red Wall factions have called on him to go. If they thought Sunak / Truss was such a winner, they would have done so. Which basically means they don’t. And which basically means we are stuck with BJ until an alternative acceptable to them emerges.

    This seems right to me.

    Not sure if anyone else mentioned it, but I bet some of those aides were at parties/organised them and see the writing on the wall.
  • Options
    franklynfranklyn Posts: 303
    My colleagues and I would value the collective wisdom of the PB readership.
    We live in North East Bedfordshire, a constituency with such a large Conservative majority that they don't count the votes but weigh them by the bushel. Labour and LibDems put up notional candidates, but essentially our MP is chosen by the selection committee of the local Conservative party.
    Sometimes they strike lucky, as with the wonderful and much missed Alastair Burt; sometimes less so.
    A group of us, by nature 'small c' conservatives, are fed up with BoJo and all that he stands for, and are preparing to put up a proper candidate at the next election, to give the good folk of North East Bedfordshire a once in a lifetime choice. We have a group of people who have the time, money and skills to run a proper campaign.
    We will register a party, but we are looking for a name. The best we can come up with is 'Let's have a Party'.
    Can the collective brains of PB come up with a better name?
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 26,010
    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    I think you have a combination of being very unlucky (Cobol, but if you relearn it the money is great because some banks can't remove their core systems that are built on it) but equally it's a matter of attitude.

    The programming language isn't that important what is important is knowing how to deconstruct the problem to be able to program a solution for it.
  • Options
    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    The UK does not value good coders. It values mediocre managers.
  • Options
    boulayboulay Posts: 4,717
    tlg86 said:

    Also, I see the Washington Football Team are now the Washington Commanders.

    What a terrible name.

    It’s terrible. They could have gone for easy such as Washington presidents, Washington senators.

    I would have recommended the “Washington Phoenixes” as it alludes to Washington rising from the flames of the British sacking (and would be funny as would always remind the Americans what we did…).

    The Washington Scandals

    The Washington Georges

    The Washington Tyne and Wears

    But the Washington Commanders. Weak.

  • Options
    rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 54,783

    I have no idea, but do the likes of SquareSpace who are effectively a modern replacement for WYSIWYG HTML editors do much business?

    That's a fair point.

    Them and Wix are counter examples.

    But 99.9% of websites by views are not made like that.
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,686

    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    The problem was that you went into mainframe programming..... COBOL. A noble trade, but one that was fading already at that time. And was dominated by what management saw as simple task which could waterfall managed, and outsourced easily.

    I went another way, along with many of my fellows - C++, then Java/C# and headed into finance.

    The IT world outside finance has caught up - it used to be double the rate of pay in the banks. Now it is fairly even.
    Either you target the future with something like Go or do something super niche where there's not much demand but almost no supply. Contractors in those languages can make well into six figures per year and have multiple clients.
  • Options
    rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 54,783

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    But as you said the acerage person can't do the job - however there are probably twice or three times as many software developers required as exist in the world.

    My point is that the demand for software developers utterly swamps the supply of them and that isn't going to be solved because most people can't think through a problem logically enough to work out how to reimplement it.
    Rubbish. 99.99% of people competently speak at least one human language, which is way more difficult than coding in C, and .0001% (enough) can code an AI which can code in C anyway.
    Ummm: all you are doing is moving the problem. Someone has to talk to the AI in a language the AI understands, and make sure that the AI understands all the edge cases, and is aware that the following API breaks if handed Unicode text, and that AI writes the correct documentation in a format another AI at another company understands.

    But yes, other than that, spot on.
    But it gets easier with every move of the problem. It is easier to tell a WYSIWYG editor to write you some html than it is to write the html. And so on.
    Nobody writes HTML in a WYSIWYG editor.

    I'm guessing, and I could be wrong here, that you might not work in tech.
    What?

    I have personally turned a cottage industry into a £4m turnover company using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_GoLive. If that isn't writing html in a WYSIWYG editor, what is?
    Didn't Adobe discontinue GoLive in about 2005?
    Yes, and it wasn't an Adobe product while I was doing this, it was GoLive CyberStudio. And £4m was a lot of money in those days.
    More seriously: the world has changed in the last two decades. In the old days, websites were individually coded pages of HTML (albeit still usually depending on CSS, which limited the use of tools like GoLive). Now, almost every page is dynamic in various ways: it will be pulling in information from various external sources, and it will need to contain enough logic to display appropriately, whether viewed on a phone or a computer. It will need to handle touch gracefully. Etc.

    This means that the hardcoded static HTML page with no external dependencies has - basically - disappeared.
    The requirement to hand write the skeleton of the page in decent HTML is still there. And understand the interaction between the static and dynamic elements is actually far more skilled than understanding flat HTML.
    Agree 100%.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 45,662

    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    The UK does not value good coders. It values mediocre managers.
    There are coding jobs in the UK on 6 figures. If anything, from what I hear and see at the moment, managers are having a hard time getting jobs. Hard technical skills are paying like crazy....
  • Options
    ydoethur said:

    On topic:

    Having listened to this evening's news on R4, one goal of Brexit has been achieved. We have gone back in time to a era where

    - The UK was not in the EU
    - Government on the edge of collapse after a couple of years in office
    - Inflation problems
    - Energy price shocks
    - US and USSR aka Russia facing off against each other
    - BoE worried about rapidly rising inflation
    - Problems getting people to go to work (WFH rather than strikes)

    As usual, the incompetents failed to hit their target of 1957 and put us in 1975.

    We joined what became the EU in 1973.
    Pedant alert - it nonetheless was not the EU. The Brexiteers are are always telling us that the EEC was fine. The EU turned up around 1990 (ish)
  • Options
    kle4 said:

    tlg86 said:

    Completely off-topic, but I know there are some NFL fans on here:

    https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/03/nfl-tanking-allegations-owner-payments-brian-flores-hue-jackson

    The NFL currently has just one Black head coach in Mike Tomlin. One, despite 70% of NFL players being Black.

    This argument annoys me in soccer, but it seriously boils my piss with American football. Here are the NFL head coaches:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_National_Football_League_head_coaches

    Of the 27 head coaches (there are five vacancies), only four had significant NFL careers:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Rivera
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Reich
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Vrabel
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Campbell

    The rest started coaching soon after leaving school/college. Indeed, the one black head coach - Mike Tomlin - did precisely that:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Tomlin

    If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.

    I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
    At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.

    In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 93,627
    tlg86 said:

    Also, I see the Washington Football Team are now the Washington Commanders.

    What a terrible name.

    I thought it was pretty good actually. Though it was pretty funny them going by WFT for a couple of years.
  • Options
    FarooqFarooq Posts: 12,172
    tlg86 said:

    Farooq said:

    tlg86 said:

    kle4 said:

    tlg86 said:

    Completely off-topic, but I know there are some NFL fans on here:

    https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/03/nfl-tanking-allegations-owner-payments-brian-flores-hue-jackson

    The NFL currently has just one Black head coach in Mike Tomlin. One, despite 70% of NFL players being Black.

    This argument annoys me in soccer, but it seriously boils my piss with American football. Here are the NFL head coaches:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_National_Football_League_head_coaches

    Of the 27 head coaches (there are five vacancies), only four had significant NFL careers:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Rivera
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Reich
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Vrabel
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Campbell

    The rest started coaching soon after leaving school/college. Indeed, the one black head coach - Mike Tomlin - did precisely that:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Tomlin

    If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.

    I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
    Power and pace are important for many of the positions.
    So Black people are more powerful and and faster than White people?
    It's to do with fast twitch muscle fibres, I believe.
    Hmmm, sounds a bit dubious.
  • Options

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.

    But let me ask you a question.

    Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?

    This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
    Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.

    Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
    Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market
    Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue

    Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
    You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
    I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.

    What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
    ....And then you get the collision of that kind of entitlement with the realisation that the "geeks" are getting big money.
    Then you get non-entities applying for jobs managing geeks and demanding more money than the geeks because (obviously!) managers must be more highly renumerated than those they manage.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 45,662
    eek said:

    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    I think you have a combination of being very unlucky (Cobol, but if you relearn it the money is great because some banks can't remove their core systems that are built on it) but equally it's a matter of attitude.

    The programming language isn't that important what is important is knowing how to deconstruct the problem to be able to program a solution for it.
    I'd also add - the attitude that a new technology you haven't seen before is *an opportunity for fun*
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 26,010
    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    But as you said the acerage person can't do the job - however there are probably twice or three times as many software developers required as exist in the world.

    My point is that the demand for software developers utterly swamps the supply of them and that isn't going to be solved because most people can't think through a problem logically enough to work out how to reimplement it.
    Rubbish. 99.99% of people competently speak at least one human language, which is way more difficult than coding in C, and .0001% (enough) can code an AI which can code in C anyway.
    Ummm: all you are doing is moving the problem. Someone has to talk to the AI in a language the AI understands, and make sure that the AI understands all the edge cases, and is aware that the following API breaks if handed Unicode text, and that AI writes the correct documentation in a format another AI at another company understands.

    But yes, other than that, spot on.
    But it gets easier with every move of the problem. It is easier to tell a WYSIWYG editor to write you some html than it is to write the html. And so on.
    Nobody writes HTML in a WYSIWYG editor.

    I'm guessing, and I could be wrong here, that you might not work in tech.
    What?

    I have personally turned a cottage industry into a £4m turnover company using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_GoLive. If that isn't writing html in a WYSIWYG editor, what is?
    Didn't Adobe discontinue GoLive in about 2005?
    Yes, and it wasn't an Adobe product while I was doing this, it was GoLive CyberStudio. And £4m was a lot of money in those days.
    More seriously: the world has changed in the last two decades. In the old days, websites were individually coded pages of HTML (albeit still usually depending on CSS, which limited the use of tools like GoLive). Now, almost every page is dynamic in various ways: it will be pulling in information from various external sources, and it will need to contain enough logic to display appropriately, whether viewed on a phone or a computer. It will need to handle touch gracefully. Etc.

    This means that the hardcoded static HTML page with no external dependencies has - basically - disappeared.
    Everything is some kind of typescript from my limited web experience.
    Look at you with your fancy tools and MS's strongly typed language. The web is built on Livescript (renamed to Javascript rapidly when it was believed that web pages would end up hosting multiple Java applets and those applets needed a language to connect them together). Plus Java was the latest greatest thing and plan old web pages were old hat given that CSS didn't exist and everything looked bad.

    Not showing my age here at all am I?
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 33,196
    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    I had a similar experience albeit 15 years earlier. I loved Cobol mainframe programming, couldn't believe I was being paid to effectively do puzzles all day.

    But... to get on I had to move into project and programme management and leave the programming behind. Project management required a very different set of skills, I was just lucky I was able to adapt. Helluva lot of ball-ache and stress though compared to programming.

    Often wish I'd gone into C++ or Java.
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 26,010

    eek said:

    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    I think you have a combination of being very unlucky (Cobol, but if you relearn it the money is great because some banks can't remove their core systems that are built on it) but equally it's a matter of attitude.

    The programming language isn't that important what is important is knowing how to deconstruct the problem to be able to program a solution for it.
    I'd also add - the attitude that a new technology you haven't seen before is *an opportunity for fun*
    To an extent I'm past that point now, people say blockchain and I go a trusted third party with a database is so much easier and cheaper...
  • Options
    El_CapitanoEl_Capitano Posts: 4,151
    rcs1000 said:

    Now, if you want to be a web developer, you will need to know CSS/JQuery/etc. You will need to be - basically - a computer programmer.

    Dude. JQuery is at least five years out of date now.

    (Which, to be fair, only emphasises your point. Keeping up with the state of the art in web development is crazily difficult. I make a slightly contrarian point of using the previous generation of tech or the one before that... you would go insane trying to use the 'in' technology all the time.)



    In other news, I went out to the pub for a meal when only Munira Mirza had resigned; had a very good steak and two pints of Old Rosie; came back, read Twitter, and omfg. I am now off to get a carry-out with more cider.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 45,662

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.

    But let me ask you a question.

    Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?

    This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
    Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.

    Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
    Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market
    Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue

    Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
    You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
    I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.

    What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
    ....And then you get the collision of that kind of entitlement with the realisation that the "geeks" are getting big money.
    Then you get non-entities applying for jobs managing geeks and demanding more money than the geeks because (obviously!) managers must be more highly renumerated than those they manage.
    My favourite was at a company where we all sitting in open plan. The team of customer engagement people - selling shit to the customers while helping them - next to us, wanted the same pay.

    They even tried (being mostly ladies) the equal-pay-for-equal-work thing .....
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 33,196
    edited February 2022
    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 68,392

    ydoethur said:

    On topic:

    Having listened to this evening's news on R4, one goal of Brexit has been achieved. We have gone back in time to a era where

    - The UK was not in the EU
    - Government on the edge of collapse after a couple of years in office
    - Inflation problems
    - Energy price shocks
    - US and USSR aka Russia facing off against each other
    - BoE worried about rapidly rising inflation
    - Problems getting people to go to work (WFH rather than strikes)

    As usual, the incompetents failed to hit their target of 1957 and put us in 1975.

    We joined what became the EU in 1973.
    Pedant alert - it nonetheless was not the EU. The Brexiteers are are always telling us that the EEC was fine. The EU turned up around 1990 (ish)
    To be exact, 1st November 1993.

    I would get out more, but it's much more fun being an anal pedant...
  • Options

    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    The UK does not value good coders. It values mediocre managers.
    There are coding jobs in the UK on 6 figures. If anything, from what I hear and see at the moment, managers are having a hard time getting jobs. Hard technical skills are paying like crazy....
    Really? Where?

    I just did a quick search on a job site.

    IT Managers £60K
    Senior A/P - £35K
  • Options
    TomsToms Posts: 2,478
    edited February 2022
    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Culture secretary and Johnson loyalist Nadine Dorries is doing the morning broadcast round tomorrow

    https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1489311564704407564

    Tweet has been deleted. Maybe Nadine's done a runner?
    Changing picture: Greg Hands, energy minister, is doing the government's morning broadcast round.

    Culture secretary Nadine Dorries lined up for Saturday.


    https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1489318291520774153
    Dangerous strategy. Energy is positive only 50% of the time.
    Watt makes you say that?
    It's all to do with the erg-onomics and dyne-amics and common cent-a-meters.
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 12,036

    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    I had a similar experience albeit 15 years earlier. I loved Cobol mainframe programming, couldn't believe I was being paid to effectively do puzzles all day.

    But... to get on I had to move into project and programme management and leave the programming behind. Project management required a very different set of skills, I was just lucky I was able to adapt. Helluva lot of ball-ache and stress though compared to programming.

    Often wish I'd gone into C++ or Java.
    I became an employment lawyer specialising in getting rich people out of messes of their own making. I’ve done okay.
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 26,010

    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    The UK does not value good coders. It values mediocre managers.
    There are coding jobs in the UK on 6 figures. If anything, from what I hear and see at the moment, managers are having a hard time getting jobs. Hard technical skills are paying like crazy....
    Really? Where?

    I just did a quick search on a job site.

    IT Managers £60K
    Senior A/P - £35K
    Current rate for a Dynamics 365 developer would be £80-90k but £500 outside or £650 inside IR35 so anyone good contracts.

  • Options
    FarooqFarooq Posts: 12,172
    My favourite programming language? Piet:

    https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 78,053
    edited February 2022

    kle4 said:

    tlg86 said:

    Completely off-topic, but I know there are some NFL fans on here:

    https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/03/nfl-tanking-allegations-owner-payments-brian-flores-hue-jackson

    The NFL currently has just one Black head coach in Mike Tomlin. One, despite 70% of NFL players being Black.

    This argument annoys me in soccer, but it seriously boils my piss with American football. Here are the NFL head coaches:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_National_Football_League_head_coaches

    Of the 27 head coaches (there are five vacancies), only four had significant NFL careers:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Rivera
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Reich
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Vrabel
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Campbell

    The rest started coaching soon after leaving school/college. Indeed, the one black head coach - Mike Tomlin - did precisely that:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Tomlin

    If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.

    I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
    At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.

    In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
    What has been true in the NFL, which has changed some what over the past 10 years, but some suggestion still an issue (of all the leagues in US sports, the head coaches in particular have been slower than other sports to embrace the data driven approach) is that there is an issue of some racial stereotyping in relation to positions has also been going on.

    QB / Tight End - White
    RB / Wide Receivers - Black

    Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
  • Options

    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.

    Apple did use Objective-C but they are now using a revamped version of it called Swift
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,686

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.

    But let me ask you a question.

    Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?

    This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
    Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.

    Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
    Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market
    Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue

    Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
    You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
    I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.

    What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
    ....And then you get the collision of that kind of entitlement with the realisation that the "geeks" are getting big money.
    Then you get non-entities applying for jobs managing geeks and demanding more money than the geeks because (obviously!) managers must be more highly renumerated than those they manage.
    What's becoming more and more common is big companies (mine included) having to wholesale copy startup hiring and employee retention practices to get decent people. For a long time we couldn't hire any developers simply because as a bank the hours were unsociable, the benefits were not very good, working days and time completely inflexible, options/share schemes non-existent outside of exec level and in work training and professional advancement limited to three or four well defined paths that developers have no interest in. In the end we recruited a new talent person from a recruitment agency that specialised in placing people into startups and she rewrote everything. Suddenly our recruitment issues went away, it also helped that we formed a new subsidiary rather than advertising jobs under our corporate name.

    Now we have great people, loads of opportunity, a very fast growing list of clients and eventually the chance for our unit to be floated on the exchange.

    The corporate world is having to adjust to competing with start ups for workers and this is driving them to create better working conditions all around. I think what's happened is that people have realised they'd rather take a high five figure salary and live easy than a into six figures and live with the bullshit you describe of poor management who don't know what they're talking about.
  • Options
    Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 34,547
    Only three aides in No 10 are paid £140k+. Two just quit (Mirza, Doyle) and the third (Rosenfield) is set to be fired or moved any minute.

    With Lister, Frost, Cummings, Cain, da Costa, and Stratton all already gone, there are in effect no senior figures left in Downing Street.

    https://twitter.com/harrytlambert/status/1489309648587010048

    This is a good point.

    It's all very well these senior Johnson allies and aides leaving Downing St (and in some cases, it *is* well that they have), but who is filling the considerable gap left behind?

    Every chance that Johnson becomes even more directionless and random.

    https://twitter.com/DavidHerdson/status/1489343678845960196
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 26,010
    Scott_xP said:

    Only three aides in No 10 are paid £140k+. Two just quit (Mirza, Doyle) and the third (Rosenfield) is set to be fired or moved any minute.

    With Lister, Frost, Cummings, Cain, da Costa, and Stratton all already gone, there are in effect no senior figures left in Downing Street.

    https://twitter.com/harrytlambert/status/1489309648587010048

    This is a good point.

    It's all very well these senior Johnson allies and aides leaving Downing St (and in some cases, it *is* well that they have), but who is filling the considerable gap left behind?

    Every chance that Johnson becomes even more directionless and random.

    https://twitter.com/DavidHerdson/status/1489343678845960196

    If Boris had planned this the replacements would be in place ready to start on Monday.

    Given that no-one is in place to start on Monday it's clear that these people are going at a timing of their own choosing and as rapidly as they can get away.
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,686

    Cookie said:

    CatMan said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    Give us a job mate
    I used to work in IT.
    I left uni with an unrelated degree in 96, and applied for several graduate training schemes. Normally the selection process included an aptitude test, which suited me pretty well - always liked puzzles, and scored very highly. Ended up getting a job as a programmer, and my career... went nowhere much.
    I ended up at a large retailer doing mainframe cobol programming. I was paid ok. In the early noughties my pay was in the mid-20s. But then IT salaries seemed to stagnate and more and more jobs were outsourced to India. My job became teaching Indians how to do my job so they could go back to India and do it more cheaply. IT appeared to be going nowhere, so I changed careers.
    It seemed a very hard career to get anywhere in. Any skills you had weren't the skills they were looking for. No-one doing pure IT was all that well paid: you had to go into management to move up the pay grades.
    Maybe it's changed in the last decade, or maybe I was just unlucky.
    The UK does not value good coders. It values mediocre managers.
    There are coding jobs in the UK on 6 figures. If anything, from what I hear and see at the moment, managers are having a hard time getting jobs. Hard technical skills are paying like crazy....
    Really? Where?

    I just did a quick search on a job site.

    IT Managers £60K
    Senior A/P - £35K
    We just recruited a senior data engineer for almost six figures and a generous options scheme.

    A friend of mine is a mid level typescript developer and he's just got a new job at north of £80k per year.
  • Options
    El_CapitanoEl_Capitano Posts: 4,151
    edited February 2022

    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.

    If you want something cross-platform, look at Flutter.

    It uses a language called Dart (basically a dialect of JavaScript) and it has the heft of Google behind it. You can trivially build for iOS and Android, and it'll even build Progressive Web Apps if you like.

    I don't use it for anything that needs to get close to the metal, but for reasonably unambitious apps it's pretty good.
  • Options
    TomsToms Posts: 2,478
    edited February 2022
    My suggestion to deal with the energy price rises.
    Per household, Increase the price of of petrol for 1st cars, double it or more for 2nd cars, and triple it or more for 3rd cars. And so forth.
    P/S My dad shared his car with us four kids.
  • Options
    Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 34,547
    Not seeing much love for Python on this thread
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,686

    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.

    Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 93,627

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.

    But let me ask you a question.

    Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?

    This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
    Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.

    Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
    Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market
    Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue

    Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
    You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
    I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.

    What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
    ....And then you get the collision of that kind of entitlement with the realisation that the "geeks" are getting big money.
    Then you get non-entities applying for jobs managing geeks and demanding more money than the geeks because (obviously!) managers must be more highly renumerated than those they manage.
    Hey, us non-entities need well paying jobs too!
  • Options

    rcs1000 said:

    Now, if you want to be a web developer, you will need to know CSS/JQuery/etc. You will need to be - basically - a computer programmer.

    Dude. JQuery is at least five years out of date now.

    (Which, to be fair, only emphasises your point. Keeping up with the state of the art in web development is crazily difficult. I make a slightly contrarian point of using the previous generation of tech or the one before that... you would go insane trying to use the 'in' technology all the time.)
    The latest fad is definitely a thing in some areas of IT. It used to annoy the heck out of me. I nearly died laughing when I saw Dave Thomas's video "Agile is dead"
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 12,036
    Scott_xP said:

    Not seeing much love for Python on this thread

    The whole Dead Parrot thing is just quoted to death. The Goodies and the Two Ronnies were far funnier.
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 26,010

    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.

    Apple did use Objective-C but they are now using a revamped version of it called Swift
    but swift isn't much use if you want the same code base for both IOS and Android.

    Then you options are Xamarin and C#, Google's weird Dart based solution and a ton of Javascript options.

    Xamerin and c# is probably the best option if you used to write Java.
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,686
    MaxPB said:

    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.

    Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
    And Python is to scripting what Radiohead is to music.
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 46,045

    kle4 said:

    tlg86 said:

    Completely off-topic, but I know there are some NFL fans on here:

    https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/03/nfl-tanking-allegations-owner-payments-brian-flores-hue-jackson

    The NFL currently has just one Black head coach in Mike Tomlin. One, despite 70% of NFL players being Black.

    This argument annoys me in soccer, but it seriously boils my piss with American football. Here are the NFL head coaches:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_National_Football_League_head_coaches

    Of the 27 head coaches (there are five vacancies), only four had significant NFL careers:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Rivera
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Reich
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Vrabel
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Campbell

    The rest started coaching soon after leaving school/college. Indeed, the one black head coach - Mike Tomlin - did precisely that:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Tomlin

    If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.

    I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
    At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.

    In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
    What has been true in the NFL, which has changed some what over the past 10 years, but some suggestion still an issue (of all the leagues in US sports, the head coaches in particular have been slower than other sports to embrace the data driven approach) is that there is an issue of some racial stereotyping in relation to positions has also been going on.

    QB / Tight End - White
    RB / Wide Receivers - Black

    Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
    At the African Cup of Nations, the only white people on view are the coaches and managers. Not for all teams.
  • Options
    SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 21,274
    boulay said:

    tlg86 said:

    Also, I see the Washington Football Team are now the Washington Commanders.

    What a terrible name.

    It’s terrible. They could have gone for easy such as Washington presidents, Washington senators.

    I would have recommended the “Washington Phoenixes” as it alludes to Washington rising from the flames of the British sacking (and would be funny as would always remind the Americans what we did…).

    The Washington Scandals

    The Washington Georges

    The Washington Tyne and Wears

    But the Washington Commanders. Weak.

    The Washington Foreskins
  • Options

    On topic:

    Having listened to this evening's news on R4, one goal of Brexit has been achieved. We have gone back in time to a era where

    - The UK was not in the EU
    - Government on the edge of collapse after a couple of years in office
    - Inflation problems
    - Energy price shocks
    - US and USSR aka Russia facing off against each other
    - BoE worried about rapidly rising inflation
    - Problems getting people to go to work (WFH rather than strikes)

    As usual, the incompetents failed to hit their target of 1957 and put us in 1975.

    The Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957. Came in to effect in 1958.
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 26,010
    MaxPB said:

    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.

    Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
    Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.

    Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
  • Options
    geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,314
    Scott_xP said:

    Not seeing much love for Python on this thread

    It's been squeezed out.

  • Options
    GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 21,021
    Why has the NYT just published a podcast suggesting that Operation Trojan Horse (the Islamist infiltration of some Birmingham schools) was a hoax?
  • Options
    kle4 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    It’s worth noting that whatever the question about Britain’s state, Rishi is not the answer.

    He’s a fully paid up Treasury stooge who thinks levelling up is a waste of time.

    But he’s more impressive than Boris. If I was Keir I’d be a bit concerned.

    there isn't any Tory that is going to spend money levelling up - that's the problem. It's going to take a Labour party willing to look at Treasury models and destroy the appalling foundations they are built on.

    Unfortunately the people who understand that earn £100,000+ way more than the Treasury fools you currently use the models and don't see the flaws or missing factors.

    Hint for anyone reading infrastructure sometimes needs to be built because it solves problems.
    Funny how we agree violently on this but (IIRC) disagree equally violently on immigration.
    Don't think I've ever commented on immigration that much.

    Were I to do so my only comment would be you allow skilled workers into the country (using a sane minimum pay level well above the average wage) and ensure that you don't allow unskilled / low paid workers in.

    Sadly we can't use the tricks other European countries could use (native language tests) because everyone speaks English better than you typical English native.
    It is worth noting that the most successful economies in the world - places like Switzerland and Singapore - have done such a good job upskilling their own citizens, that it is unskilled labour that their economies demand.
    Both also have populations of less than 5% and have low tax so long attracted high net worth residents and financial services.

    Both are also expensive to live in, so also limiting the attraction for the non high skilled and non high paid
    Wait: the UK has a population of more than 172 million people???

    Wow.

    More seriously, let me turn the question around. Would you rather your child was educated to the level where they could be a well paid software engineer? Or would you rather they decided that we needed to have more people who were only skilled to clean toilets?
    In 95% of countries the average citizen is not going to be able to be educated to be a well paid software engineer. For starters as there are only so many well paid software engineer jobs to go round globally.

    We will also still need some people to clean the toilets
    Show me someone who can think logically through a problem (yes, I know that automatically excludes you) and I will be able to find them a job paying more well above the average wage tomorrow and after a bit of time and experience easily £60k+

    The world doesn't have a shortage of well paid software engineer jobs, there is insatiable demand for software engineers, the world has a shorter of people able to write software.

    There are 7.9 billion people on earth, there are not enough software engineer or writing software jobs for the 3.95 billion who constitute half of the global population let alone all of them
    Software engineer, in my case, was a euphamism for 'job that requires above average skills on a global scale'.

    But let me ask you a question.

    Bob (17) of Ashford is capable of being trained to be an accountant or a solicitor or a web developer or whatever. Should we train him to do that job? Or would it be better to import someone high skilled to do it, and to get Bob to clean toilets?

    This is the new levelling down agenda. To avoid any danger of the UK economy requiring lower skilled workers, we will avoid training people up to do jobs that might result in higher than average wages.
    Remember however it was the lower skilled who were the majority of the Leave vote and they were the ones who shifted this government to focus on cutting low skilled immigration that cut their wages.

    Yes a few of them might have been able to be trained to get high skilled, high paid jobs but not most. The majority of the most highly educated voted Remain which lost
    Proximate problem: British people are being out-competed in the labour market
    Ultimate problem: successive British governments have failed to solve the UK's skills issue

    Do you want to solve the proximate problem or the ultimate one?
    You think it's a supply problem rather than a demand problem?
    I think it is an attitude problem. As an example, STEM has, for too long, been viewed as a geek thing - a domain of the socially untalented and non-cool types. It also has a nasty reputation for requiring understanding of highly non-intuitive problems which hurts the brains of a lot of people.

    What a lot of people want is a job with status, bossing people about that pays lots of money for as little effort as possible.
    ....And then you get the collision of that kind of entitlement with the realisation that the "geeks" are getting big money.
    Then you get non-entities applying for jobs managing geeks and demanding more money than the geeks because (obviously!) managers must be more highly renumerated than those they manage.
    Hey, us non-entities need well paying jobs too!
    :D:D
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,686
    eek said:

    MaxPB said:

    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.

    Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
    Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.

    Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
    What do you mean? Doesn't everybody enjoy reading through their scripts 8 times to make sure the indents are all correct?!
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 46,045
    geoffw said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Not seeing much love for Python on this thread

    It's been squeezed out.

    The whole subject is a bit of a boa, and quite constricting.
  • Options
    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    tlg86 said:

    Completely off-topic, but I know there are some NFL fans on here:

    https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/03/nfl-tanking-allegations-owner-payments-brian-flores-hue-jackson

    The NFL currently has just one Black head coach in Mike Tomlin. One, despite 70% of NFL players being Black.

    This argument annoys me in soccer, but it seriously boils my piss with American football. Here are the NFL head coaches:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_National_Football_League_head_coaches

    Of the 27 head coaches (there are five vacancies), only four had significant NFL careers:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Rivera
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Reich
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Vrabel
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Campbell

    The rest started coaching soon after leaving school/college. Indeed, the one black head coach - Mike Tomlin - did precisely that:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Tomlin

    If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.

    I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
    At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.

    In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
    What has been true in the NFL, which has changed some what over the past 10 years, but some suggestion still an issue (of all the leagues in US sports, the head coaches in particular have been slower than other sports to embrace the data driven approach) is that there is an issue of some racial stereotyping in relation to positions has also been going on.

    QB / Tight End - White
    RB / Wide Receivers - Black

    Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
    At the African Cup of Nations, the only white people on view are the coaches and managers. Not for all teams.
    I am not sure your point?
  • Options
    tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,521
    Scott_xP said:

    Not seeing much love for Python on this thread

    You shouldn’t be so IDLE.
  • Options
    Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 34,547
    And.. a sensible senior figure who has all the way through this told me that, while it's bumpy, the PM should be able to survive, tonight says PM can probably get thru it for the moment but it's looking very hard post May (after local elections). That's a clear shift
    https://twitter.com/BethRigby/status/1489346993977802752
  • Options
    AlistairMAlistairM Posts: 2,004

    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.

    I'd recommend Flutter with Firebase backend. Makes cross platform App development very easy. Language is called Dart which is very similar to Java/C#. Having never coded my own app before (although lots of over coding in the past) I was able to build something from scratch and get it on the app stores in a few weeks.
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 26,010
    As we are doing tech stuff (so scared everyone else away)

    Corey Quinn
    @QuinnyPig
    Wild that @awscloud is now a $70 billion annual run rate business. But don't worry, AWS employee friends; the market cares not a whit how well you perform your jobs.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 68,392
    tlg86 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Not seeing much love for Python on this thread

    You shouldn’t be so IDLE.
    You were in a Terrying hurry to make that pun, weren't you?
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 46,045

    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    tlg86 said:

    Completely off-topic, but I know there are some NFL fans on here:

    https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/03/nfl-tanking-allegations-owner-payments-brian-flores-hue-jackson

    The NFL currently has just one Black head coach in Mike Tomlin. One, despite 70% of NFL players being Black.

    This argument annoys me in soccer, but it seriously boils my piss with American football. Here are the NFL head coaches:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_National_Football_League_head_coaches

    Of the 27 head coaches (there are five vacancies), only four had significant NFL careers:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Rivera
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Reich
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Vrabel
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Campbell

    The rest started coaching soon after leaving school/college. Indeed, the one black head coach - Mike Tomlin - did precisely that:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Tomlin

    If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.

    I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
    At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.

    In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
    What has been true in the NFL, which has changed some what over the past 10 years, but some suggestion still an issue (of all the leagues in US sports, the head coaches in particular have been slower than other sports to embrace the data driven approach) is that there is an issue of some racial stereotyping in relation to positions has also been going on.

    QB / Tight End - White
    RB / Wide Receivers - Black

    Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
    At the African Cup of Nations, the only white people on view are the coaches and managers. Not for all teams.
    I am not sure your point?
    Just that it isn't just a Gridiron issue.
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 26,010
    MaxPB said:

    eek said:

    MaxPB said:

    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.

    Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
    Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.

    Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
    What do you mean? Doesn't everybody enjoy reading through their scripts 8 times to make sure the indents are all correct?!
    It's almost like Guido didn't have the {} symbols on his keyboard.
  • Options
    moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,255
    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/boris-is-finished-it-s-when-not-if

    “It's not just that the rats are leaving the sinking ship. They're also fighting in a sack. The question tonight in the Tory party is now when the threshold for 54 letters will be reached — not if.”

    If they get this done quickly (before the police finish their work) they can avoid the mess of a sitting Pm being sanctioned under criminal law, or the even greater calamity of Raab having to write letters to the Trident sub commanders.
  • Options
    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.

    Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
    And Python is to scripting what Radiohead is to music.
    I had done a few things in Python out of curiousity more than anything else and I can see how the massive choice of code libraries that exist can be really, really useful, but I found the language itself to be really clunky like having to pass "self" as a parameter in member functions, or the complete omission of arrays when they went to the trouble of having lists, dictionaries, sets and tuples.

    I had assumed that the language would be "quirk" free. Then I moved from Python 2.7 to Python 3 and Oh My God!!!!! Everything just broke.
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,686
    eek said:

    As we are doing tech stuff (so scared everyone else away)

    Corey Quinn
    @QuinnyPig
    Wild that @awscloud is now a $70 billion annual run rate business. But don't worry, AWS employee friends; the market cares not a whit how well you perform your jobs.

    GCP is approaching $20bn ARR from a standing stars a few years ago. It's incredible how much the big three have come to dominate cloud services so totally.
  • Options
    CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,269
    One thing is worth noting about resignations is this. Just as with Partygate - where plenty had experience of losing out at family occasions (what Aaron Bell expressed so well) - there will also be people in Parliament and/or No 10 who have personal experience or knowledge of child abuse or sexual abuse. And this may well inform their actions even if it is not made public.

    If you do you will be disgusted as most are at such behaviour. But it it will also feel personal and hurtful and so maybe make you more likely to act.

    We all have Red Lines and they can sometimes be intensely personal ones that others may not have a clue about. It is not the first time the PM has shown in Parliament a complete lack of empathy for what women go through. Not odd - given his own history - but also a bit odd given Carrie's, especially in light of her supposed control over him.
  • Options
    glwglw Posts: 9,600
    edited February 2022
    MaxPB said:

    eek said:

    As we are doing tech stuff (so scared everyone else away)

    Corey Quinn
    @QuinnyPig
    Wild that @awscloud is now a $70 billion annual run rate business. But don't worry, AWS employee friends; the market cares not a whit how well you perform your jobs.

    GCP is approaching $20bn ARR from a standing stars a few years ago. It's incredible how much the big three have come to dominate cloud services so totally.
    It always make me chuckle when people say Google Cloud is losing, how many businesses ever grow as fast as that? Basically none.
  • Options
    Beibheirli_CBeibheirli_C Posts: 8,015
    edited February 2022
    moonshine said:

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/boris-is-finished-it-s-when-not-if

    “It's not just that the rats are leaving the sinking ship. They're also fighting in a sack. The question tonight in the Tory party is now when the threshold for 54 letters will be reached — not if.”

    If they get this done quickly (before the police finish their work) they can avoid the mess of a sitting Pm being sanctioned under criminal law, or the even greater calamity of Raab having to write letters to the Trident sub commanders.

    I would not worry about Raab. He will probably post the letters in a postbox and hope the Royal Mail can find "The Captain / Submarine with nukes / At sea" ;)
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 78,053
    edited February 2022
    Foxy said:

    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    tlg86 said:

    Completely off-topic, but I know there are some NFL fans on here:

    https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/03/nfl-tanking-allegations-owner-payments-brian-flores-hue-jackson

    The NFL currently has just one Black head coach in Mike Tomlin. One, despite 70% of NFL players being Black.

    This argument annoys me in soccer, but it seriously boils my piss with American football. Here are the NFL head coaches:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_National_Football_League_head_coaches

    Of the 27 head coaches (there are five vacancies), only four had significant NFL careers:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Rivera
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Reich
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Vrabel
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Campbell

    The rest started coaching soon after leaving school/college. Indeed, the one black head coach - Mike Tomlin - did precisely that:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Tomlin

    If race is an issue, it's no good looking at the NFL. It's far too late. The place to look is high schools and colleges.

    I know this was not the main point, but 70% of players are black? That seems amazingly high.
    At the dawn of professional football in America, there were disproportionate numbers of men from immigrant, working-class backgrounds. Why? Because it was a way that a kid with little education and fewer prospects BUT with exceptional athletic talent could rise in the world. PROVIDED they could cope with the grueling physical and other demands.

    In the past half-century or so, starting with the desegregation of professional sport in the USA, this imperative has shifted, away from Whites from non-WASP backgrounds, to Blacks (and also Latinos) who come from similar hard-scramble origins.
    What has been true in the NFL, which has changed some what over the past 10 years, but some suggestion still an issue (of all the leagues in US sports, the head coaches in particular have been slower than other sports to embrace the data driven approach) is that there is an issue of some racial stereotyping in relation to positions has also been going on.

    QB / Tight End - White
    RB / Wide Receivers - Black

    Should be noted that currently best QB is black and the best WR is white.
    At the African Cup of Nations, the only white people on view are the coaches and managers. Not for all teams.
    I am not sure your point?
    Just that it isn't just a Gridiron issue.
    I am still not sure of your point. We were talking about a racial profile for dedicated positions in the game.

    African nations choosing a white coach, its because most international teams are looking to hire somebody with a fantastic track record coaching in the top leagues e.g. Egypt has Carlos Queiroz, ex Portugal (and a load of other international teams and of course Man Utd assistant.

    Its why England hired a load of foreign managers.

    The wider point about coaching is that the model of they were a pro leads to manager is becoming less so. In many cases, you have to be dedicating yourself to the job of coach or manager rather than ever playing (or not for very long).
  • Options
    GIN1138GIN1138 Posts: 21,191
    8am Sir Graham announces 54 letters have been achieved?
  • Options
    eek said:

    MaxPB said:

    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.

    Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
    Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.

    Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
    Perl is the world's premier write only language.
  • Options
    pm215pm215 Posts: 999


    The problem was that you went into mainframe programming..... COBOL. A noble trade, but one that was fading already at that time. And was dominated by what management saw as simple task which could waterfall managed, and outsourced easily.

    I went another way, along with many of my fellows - C++, then Java/C# and headed into finance.

    I think the other thing that helps is working for a company that sees software as one of its core competencies, not as a cost centre that it grudgingly funds as little as possible while it gets on with the important stuff. I get the impression that the latter kind of company is much more prone to outsourcing, paying worse, and hanging on to obsolete technology.
  • Options
    SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 21,274
    Grab a Geek night on PB.

  • Options
    rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 54,783


    There are coding jobs in the UK on 6 figures. If anything, from what I hear and see at the moment, managers are having a hard time getting jobs. Hard technical skills are paying like crazy....

    At Just our (mostly UK based) coders (not managers) are on £70-90k.

    But we've always followed the principle that it's better to get one great £80k a year developer than three mediocre ones at £20k each.
  • Options

    eek said:

    MaxPB said:

    Since it's technology night tonight on PB, what's the best platform for a very rusty old coder with a smattering of C and Java to have a crack at developing IOS and Android apps?

    Is there one platform/language that can cover both?

    Just fancy having a go at a couple of 'winter project' ideas.

    Can I interest you in the wonderful and glorious scripting language of Python? 😄
    Any language that uses white space for syntax deserves to be nuked from orbit.

    Give me Perl where you could write your 2000 line program in a 1 utterly unreadable line...
    Perl is the world's premier write only language.
    Regexes must run it a close second ;)
This discussion has been closed.