As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
The issue there is more likely prejudice against employing the over 50s. The incentives ought to be for the employers, not the prematurely retired.
I would like to see how they got the 1.2 million figure,
by my reckoning its far too high using even today figures
Education 11 years time 7k (most born in 56 will have not gone to uni or even a levels) = 77k
Child benefit for 2 kids 35 * 52 * 18 = 32k
Pension and lets be generous and say they live till 95 hence 30 years at 10k = 300k
health care = xk unemployment = yk
total figure then is 77 + 32 + 300 + x + y = 399 + x +y
x+y therefore average 800k per person. Sorry frankly that guy is talking bollocks
You've missed out tax credits.
The vast majority of people with children get tax credits and the amounts are far greater than child benefit.
I doubt many born in 1956 got tax credits because they didn't come in till new labour era
Prior to Tax Credits was Income Support, and prior to that was Supplementary Benefit, and prior to that National Assistance.
These varied somewhat in scope and generosity, but we're the "in work benefits" for families with children of their time.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
What are you going to cut or who are you going to tax more to pay for it. Ah of course the people getting 5% payrises will get the brunt.
That’s another argument. The ‘line’ from government was that this is all about inflation. It’s isn’t; it’s about cutting the pay of those in the public sector.
If they are arguing in favour if that, so be it - but be honest about what they are doing.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
The issue there is more likely prejudice against employing the over 50s. The incentives ought to be for the employers, not the prematurely retired.
I would like to see how they got the 1.2 million figure,
by my reckoning its far too high using even today figures
Education 11 years time 7k (most born in 56 will have not gone to uni or even a levels) = 77k
Child benefit for 2 kids 35 * 52 * 18 = 32k
Pension and lets be generous and say they live till 95 hence 30 years at 10k = 300k
health care = xk unemployment = yk
total figure then is 77 + 32 + 300 + x + y = 399 + x +y
x+y therefore average 800k per person. Sorry frankly that guy is talking bollocks
Interesting analysis.
OTOH the £940k tax figure seems quite high. It's £18.8k tax per year for 50 years. I know there's VAT, and Council Tax but a person on the median UK salary of £33,2800 pa only pays £6.8k pa in Income Tax and NI.
Surprising to me thing to come out of that BBC Economics reporting review- in large chunks of the country, VAT is more important than income tax;
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
The issue there is more likely prejudice against employing the over 50s. The incentives ought to be for the employers, not the prematurely retired.
I would like to see how they got the 1.2 million figure,
by my reckoning its far too high using even today figures
Education 11 years time 7k (most born in 56 will have not gone to uni or even a levels) = 77k
Child benefit for 2 kids 35 * 52 * 18 = 32k
Pension and lets be generous and say they live till 95 hence 30 years at 10k = 300k
health care = xk unemployment = yk
total figure then is 77 + 32 + 300 + x + y = 399 + x +y
x+y therefore average 800k per person. Sorry frankly that guy is talking bollocks
You've missed out tax credits.
The vast majority of people with children get tax credits and the amounts are far greater than child benefit.
I doubt many born in 1956 got tax credits because they didn't come in till new labour era
Prior to Tax Credits was Income Support, and prior to that was Supplementary Benefit, and prior to that National Assistance.
These varied somewhat in scope and generosity, but we're the "in work benefits" for families with children of their time.
Change unemployment to benefits in general then. I still doubt that health + benefits came to 800k over a lifetime and frankly few got income support or supplementary benefit while in work anyway. I know I damn well couldnt when I had my son despite being pretty much shafted money wise. The first year of his life for example I would have been 30£ a month better off if I quit work and claimed unemployment. So I think that help was a lot less than you think
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
Thanks, interesting.
Re point 3) Doesn't that still apply to books you sell to the EU?
Anyway, I am glad your business is doing well.
PS Why is "Some Unusual Engines" by L J K Setright so expensive? I used to have a copy and lent it to someone, never got it back. Whenever I look to get a replacement copy it's always well over £100, so I demur.
In a way, yes, recipients of items ordered pay VAT on the items imported. But crucially, that becomes the responsibility of the importer - rather than an administrative headache for us.
Re the book, if I had to guess I'd say demand slightly outstrips supply. But there are four copies for sale on Abebooks (including one in Gillingham for £100), so demand clearly isn't that high - I suspect some of it is past market forces (i.e. someone sold one at a good price, or historic overpricing) combined with sellers who have ready access to information (i.e. they can see that historic price of other copies and don't know any better). If it's any consolation, if I had one it would be on our £5 shelves in the porch. My only tip would be set a 'want' for it on eBay and Abebooks, and eventually someone will list one at a normal price without having looked up the others....!
Switching between the two main parties is unusual, even when there is a big swing and a big victory for one party or the other.
An important point - doing so is basically admitting you made a mistake last time. Abstaining for an election makes a subsequent change easier to accept; one of the key reasons why a party that falls slightly short can often do better in a second election soon after.
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
So if only the whole country could make a living all selling old stuff to one another, we’d be fine?
Our BoP would be fantastic too; I export 50x more than I import!
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
Thanks, interesting.
Re point 3) Doesn't that still apply to books you sell to the EU?
Anyway, I am glad your business is doing well.
PS Why is "Some Unusual Engines" by L J K Setright so expensive? I used to have a copy and lent it to someone, never got it back. Whenever I look to get a replacement copy it's always well over £100, so I demur.
In a way, yes, recipients of items ordered pay VAT on the items imported. But crucially, that becomes the responsibility of the importer - rather than an administrative headache for us.
Re the book, if I had to guess I'd say demand slightly outstrips supply. But there are four copies for sale on Abebooks (including one in Gillingham for £100), so demand clearly isn't that high - I suspect some of it is past market forces (i.e. someone sold one at a good price, or historic overpricing) combined with sellers who have ready access to information (i.e. they can see that historic price of other copies and don't know any better). If it's any consolation, if I had one it would be on our £5 shelves in the porch. My only tip would be set a 'want' for it on eBay and Abebooks, and eventually someone will list one at a normal price without having looked up the others....!
Switching between the two main parties is unusual, even when there is a big swing and a big victory for one party or the other.
An important point - doing so is basically admitting you made a mistake last time. Abstaining for an election makes a subsequent change easier to accept; one of the key reasons why a party that falls slightly short can often do better in a second election soon after.
Yes. Which is why Labour majority or minority is largely irrelevant. NOM just leads to an early election (around 2 years) which leads to a majority. Historically anyways.
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
Thanks, interesting.
Re point 3) Doesn't that still apply to books you sell to the EU?
Anyway, I am glad your business is doing well.
PS Why is "Some Unusual Engines" by L J K Setright so expensive? I used to have a copy and lent it to someone, never got it back. Whenever I look to get a replacement copy it's always well over £100, so I demur.
I'd forgotten about LJK! He and Ogri in Bike were monthly necessities.
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
Thanks, interesting.
Re point 3) Doesn't that still apply to books you sell to the EU?
Anyway, I am glad your business is doing well.
PS Why is "Some Unusual Engines" by L J K Setright so expensive? I used to have a copy and lent it to someone, never got it back. Whenever I look to get a replacement copy it's always well over £100, so I demur.
In a way, yes, recipients of items ordered pay VAT on the items imported. But crucially, that becomes the responsibility of the importer - rather than an administrative headache for us.
Re the book, if I had to guess I'd say demand slightly outstrips supply. But there are four copies for sale on Abebooks (including one in Gillingham for £100), so demand clearly isn't that high - I suspect some of it is past market forces (i.e. someone sold one at a good price, or historic overpricing) combined with sellers who have ready access to information (i.e. they can see that historic price of other copies and don't know any better). If it's any consolation, if I had one it would be on our £5 shelves in the porch. My only tip would be set a 'want' for it on eBay and Abebooks, and eventually someone will list one at a normal price without having looked up the others....!
...But there are four copies for sale on Abebooks (including one in Gillingham for £100)
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
So if only the whole country could make a living all selling old stuff to one another, we’d be fine?
Rather that even in a disaster, someone will benefit.
Brexit has been bad for the economy, but it hasn’t destroyed it; there are almost bound to be winners.
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
So if only the whole country could make a living all selling old stuff to one another, we’d be fine?
Our BoP would be fantastic too; I export 50x more than I import!
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
So if only the whole country could make a living all selling old stuff to one another, we’d be fine?
Our BoP would be fantastic too; I export 50x more than I import!
…until we ran out of old stuff!
We have lots of old people we could export as CHB keeps pointing out
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
I agree. The only thing I will credit Sunak with is realising this, and that he cannot give in to strikes. I think otherwise, every time he has backed away from the fights he needed to have, and engaged in those he oughtn't to have. The press and wider public generally overestimate the power of a precarious new administration in which some members can literally not know where the lavs are.
Truss' mistake was familiarity, I think, rather than naivety, with Whitehall. The knew what the levers were and so pushed them quicker. Too quickly. A real shame, because her pro growth policies actually had a chance of changing the fortunes of the nation relatively swiftly.
I am a natural conspiracy theorist (not something I admire in myself it must be said) and I do see the Truss era as something of a staged drama played out before our eyes - the decisive slaying of the style of 'capitalism' that the worldwide blob wants shot of. I am afraid I'm wholly convinced that Kwasi went off like a dodgy hand grenade on purpose. I would like to think that Truss was sincere, and was somehow convinced away from her initial wish for a fully costed fiscal statement.
Either way, Kwasi's budget was totally unnecessary, beside the point, foolishly presented, and a pile of toss.
On the positive side, Rishi is now similarly poisoning the well for decline-management, and people are starting to talk about growth and what the Government is going to do about it again.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
What are you going to cut or who are you going to tax more to pay for it. Ah of course the people getting 5% payrises will get the brunt.
Easy.
Cut the triple lock to start with, so that everyone's pay goes up the same amount and those who aren't working don't see bigger pay rises than those who are.
Increase taxes on those who aren't paying the full rate of income tax, by merging income tax, NI etc together so people can no longer dodge NI and we all pay the same rate regardless of how we earn our income.
Do you agree with these two concepts? That everyone earning the same income should pay the same tax rate, and that those who don't work shouldn't be getting more than those who do?
I am fine with the latter, in fact I suggested state pension clawback once on here at a rate of 1£ for every 5£ of private pension over 5k as well as NI.
I don't agree however with pensioners not getting the full col rise because most aren't in a position to increase their income where as most working age people are either via retraining or taking on extra work.
Pensioners could work if they choose to do so, if they're not doing so that's a choice. You're not forbidden from working just because you've reached pension age and hundreds of thousands of them do.
If you want to help the poorest pensioners with COL then then there's pension credit for that, but simply giving a blanket £11bn to all pensioners regardless of circumstances, there's absolutely no need for that, or justification for it when those who are actually working for a living are losing out.
Pensioners are still screwed irrespective of the state pension increase. My Company .pension is govt run by the FAS. No.increase on any pension earned before i think.1987 so most of my pension is reducing in value dramatically year on Yr. Last Yr my pension rose less that 1 pc. Some get no.increase whatsover.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
So if only the whole country could make a living all selling old stuff to one another, we’d be fine?
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
I agree. The only thing I will credit Sunak with is realising this, and that he cannot give in to strikes. I think otherwise, every time he has backed away from the fights he needed to have, and engaged in those he oughtn't to have. The press and wider public generally overestimate the power of a precarious new administration in which some members can literally not know where the lavs are.
Truss' mistake was familiarity, I think, rather than naivety, with Whitehall. The knew what the levers were and so pushed them quicker. Too quickly. A real shame, because her pro growth policies actually had a chance of changing the fortunes of the nation relatively swiftly.
I am a natural conspiracy theorist (not something I admire in myself it must be said) and I do see the Truss era as something of a staged drama played out before our eyes - the decisive slaying of the style of 'capitalism' that the worldwide blob wants shot of. I am afraid I'm wholly convinced that Kwasi went off like a dodgy hand grenade on purpose. I would like to think that Truss was sincere, and was somehow convinced away from her initial wish for a fully costed fiscal statement.
Either way, Kwasi's budget was totally unnecessary, beside the point, foolishly presented, and a pile of toss.
On the positive side, Rishi is now similarly poisoning the well for decline-management, and people are starting to talk about growth and what the Government is going to do about it again.
If we’re onto conspiracies…(and why not)…to me the Trussterfuck was perfectly designed to pave the way for a near-total destruction of cherished public institutions such as the NHS. Make all the money magically disappear by unexpectedly announcing complete economic nonsense, and you make it much easier for a bunch of nefarious goons to withhold the funding needed to protect eg the NHS from destruction.
If I were a dodgy donor for the Tories with a sideline in private healthcare, I’d be rubbing my hands in glee.
But then I’m not a conspiracy theorist like you are 😉
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
What are you going to cut or who are you going to tax more to pay for it. Ah of course the people getting 5% payrises will get the brunt.
Easy.
Cut the triple lock to start with, so that everyone's pay goes up the same amount and those who aren't working don't see bigger pay rises than those who are.
Increase taxes on those who aren't paying the full rate of income tax, by merging income tax, NI etc together so people can no longer dodge NI and we all pay the same rate regardless of how we earn our income.
Do you agree with these two concepts? That everyone earning the same income should pay the same tax rate, and that those who don't work shouldn't be getting more than those who do?
I am fine with the latter, in fact I suggested state pension clawback once on here at a rate of 1£ for every 5£ of private pension over 5k as well as NI.
I don't agree however with pensioners not getting the full col rise because most aren't in a position to increase their income where as most working age people are either via retraining or taking on extra work.
Pensioners could work if they choose to do so, if they're not doing so that's a choice. You're not forbidden from working just because you've reached pension age and hundreds of thousands of them do.
If you want to help the poorest pensioners with COL then then there's pension credit for that, but simply giving a blanket £11bn to all pensioners regardless of circumstances, there's absolutely no need for that, or justification for it when those who are actually working for a living are losing out.
Pensioners are still screwed irrespective of the state pension increase. My Company .pension is govt run by the FAS. No.increase on any pension earned before i think.1987 so most of my pension is reducing in value dramatically year on Yr. Last Yr my pension rose less that 1 pc. Some get no.increase whatsover.
Sympathies for this. I am involved in the campaign to get this rectified. I assume you are a member of PAG? I won't bore people on this site with the details, but this was a rip off of these pensioners disguised as a rescue.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
Yeah. I'm trying to keep kids out of secure units. A place in one of those costs an absolute fortune. But I'm constantly being hampered by the failure to provide the relatively small sums which would make this much more possible. And chief amongst those is provision of staff. If we could move from five staff to seven that would solve loads of it. But we can't cos the pay is so uncompetitive. And no one wants to work in remedial units. Simply being able to get mental health, ASD appointments or ADHD assessments within a few months would really help too. But all support services appear to have collapsed.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
I agree. The only thing I will credit Sunak with is realising this, and that he cannot give in to strikes. I think otherwise, every time he has backed away from the fights he needed to have, and engaged in those he oughtn't to have. The press and wider public generally overestimate the power of a precarious new administration in which some members can literally not know where the lavs are.
Truss' mistake was familiarity, I think, rather than naivety, with Whitehall. The knew what the levers were and so pushed them quicker. Too quickly. A real shame, because her pro growth policies actually had a chance of changing the fortunes of the nation relatively swiftly.
I am a natural conspiracy theorist (not something I admire in myself it must be said) and I do see the Truss era as something of a staged drama played out before our eyes - the decisive slaying of the style of 'capitalism' that the worldwide blob wants shot of. I am afraid I'm wholly convinced that Kwasi went off like a dodgy hand grenade on purpose. I would like to think that Truss was sincere, and was somehow convinced away from her initial wish for a fully costed fiscal statement.
Either way, Kwasi's budget was totally unnecessary, beside the point, foolishly presented, and a pile of toss.
On the positive side, Rishi is now similarly poisoning the well for decline-management, and people are starting to talk about growth and what the Government is going to do about it again.
If we’re onto conspiracies…(and why not)…to me the Trussterfuck was perfectly designed to pave the way for a near-total destruction of cherished public institutions such as the NHS. Make all the money magically disappear by unexpectedly announcing complete economic nonsense, and you make it much easier for a bunch of nefarious goons to withhold the funding needed to protect eg the NHS from destruction.
If I were a dodgy donor for the Tories with a sideline in private healthcare, I’d be rubbing my hands in glee.
But then I’m not a conspiracy theorist like you are 😉
It's an interesting theory! There's certainly a curious reluctance to find money at the moment. The Government has signed over (off the top of my head) £111bn to the Bank of England to cover losses on its bond sales. The US Government is not doing this at all, they're just keeping the losses from US bond sales on the Fed's books. The ECB is not selling any bonds at a loss at all. We're the odd ones out.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
… Osthoff gave the agents text messages from 2016 with Santos, who he says used his plight to raise $3,000 for life-saving surgery for the pit bull mix, Sapphire — then ghosted with the funds, as first reported by Patch.
“I’m glad to get the ball rolling with the big-wigs,” Osthoff said in an interview Wednesday. “I was worried that what happened to me was too long ago to be prosecuted.”…
Big moves in Ukraine in what looks like an anti corruption apcampaign.
Multiple resignations, indictments, and seizures by law enforcement in Kyiv. Top oligarchs are targeted, too, inlcuding Kolomoyskyi and Firtash. Zelensky appears to use the momentum to push against some of the oligarchs and deep state. Details in this thread https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1620799910223417345
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. And other Unis like a kind of UEFA Conference League. 3. A way of matching skills with employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
Parliament. The Met. Other police forces. The NHS. The Army. The London Fire Brigade.
Now another fire service.
Could these men just learn to behave, for crying out loud. It's not that hard.
And if they can't could they just piss off to some remote part of the world and behave like priapic baboons with each other and leave civilised people in peace. Thanks.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Big moves in Ukraine in what looks like an anti corruption apcampaign.
Multiple resignations, indictments, and seizures by law enforcement in Kyiv. Top oligarchs are targeted, too, inlcuding Kolomoyskyi and Firtash. Zelensky appears to use the momentum to push against some of the oligarchs and deep state. Details in this thread https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1620799910223417345
Utterly delighted if Firtash is being targeted. An utterly toxic individual. I hope we target some of his associates and enablers here. (I have some professional knowledge about them and it's long past the time they got their collars felt.)
Big moves in Ukraine in what looks like an anti corruption apcampaign.
Multiple resignations, indictments, and seizures by law enforcement in Kyiv. Top oligarchs are targeted, too, inlcuding Kolomoyskyi and Firtash. Zelensky appears to use the momentum to push against some of the oligarchs and deep state. Details in this thread https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1620799910223417345
Kolomoisky, or "Benya" with the office shark tank who sends his enemies coffins, has been under investigation by a US grand jury for some time. He is subject to US sanctions. Some of his assets in London have been frozen.
"We’re launching a pilot subscription plan for ChatGPT, a conversational AI that can chat with you, answer follow-up questions, and challenge incorrect assumptions"
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely. Unfortunately, we get top down directed bollocks insisting that as well as X we teach y z and ABC too. This requires much more funding. But loads of the resistance and kicking off comes from a one size fits all National Curriculum. We survived for decades without one.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely.
I also wonder, judging from my school days, how much of the acting up done by pupils is because they are bored because they don't really see the point of what they are being taught. The "Why do I need to learn calculus when I can just goto a website and plug in the numbers in the unlikely event I will ever need it" . Now I can do calculus standing on my head and despite having worked in both chemistry and physics labs before I became a software engineer I don't think I have ever needed to use it in anger. Learning stats to a deeper level on the other hand would have been a lot more useful
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
What about if you don't want to run a business? Whatever you do you will need basic English and Maths. If you don't have that you won't have the English skills to read a contract or the numeracy skills to book keep or do your tax returns anyway.
If you don't have any language skills you won't be much use exporting and importing from the Continent either. History is vital to understand your culture and global cultures.
Vocational skills and apprenticeships are already available in 6th form anyway
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely. Unfortunately, we get top down directed bollocks insisting that as well as X we teach y z and ABC too. This requires much more funding. But loads of the resistance and kicking off comes from a one size fits all National Curriculum. We survived for decades without one.
Which gets back to one of my other points public sector doing more with less, in this case the toss pots that come up with the national curriculum and all its checkboxes.
Anyone in their 50s / early 60s no longer working should get a State Pension Forecast immediately - you can do it in literally 5 minutes on Gov.uk.
You can usually only fill in missing years of NI contributions for up to 6 years - but exceptionally until 5 April 2023 you can fill in all years back to 2006/07.
It's usually said that you need 35 years of NI contributions for a full state pension but if you have been contracted out you need many more years.
If this applies to you it is MASSIVE. To fill in a year you pay approx £800 and you get approx £5 per week (ie £260 per year) more state pension.
If you live in retirement for 20 years you are paying £800 to get back £5,200. And of course it's triple locked.
Once you get your forecast, ring the Future Pension Service Helpline on 0800 731 0175 and they will talk it through with you.
I did it yesterday - it took 75 mins for them to answer - but the person who did was brilliant - highly intelligent and knew everything.
If you have retired early or just not worked for certain periods this literally may be one of the most important things you ever do.
Similar experience - although I was luckier with my wait. They promised to send a letter with my options but it hasn’t arrived yet. If you have got gaps in your record it’s as close to a “no brainer” as you’ll get.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely.
I also wonder, judging from my school days, how much of the acting up done by pupils is because they are bored because they don't really see the point of what they are being taught. The "Why do I need to learn calculus when I can just goto a website and plug in the numbers in the unlikely event I will ever need it" . Now I can do calculus standing on my head and despite having worked in both chemistry and physics labs before I became a software engineer I don't think I have ever needed to use it in anger. Learning stats to a deeper level on the other hand would have been a lot more useful
Yup. I'm struggling to teach a kid simple addition and reading right now. But she draws and paints at gallery standard already. It's obvious at age 12 that's what she'll do for a living. She's quite exceptional. But she's firmly convinced she's thick.
Big moves in Ukraine in what looks like an anti corruption apcampaign.
Multiple resignations, indictments, and seizures by law enforcement in Kyiv. Top oligarchs are targeted, too, inlcuding Kolomoyskyi and Firtash. Zelensky appears to use the momentum to push against some of the oligarchs and deep state. Details in this thread https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1620799910223417345
Utterly delighted if Firtash is being targeted. An utterly toxic individual. I hope we target some of his associates and enablers here. (I have some professional knowledge about them and it's long past the time they got their collars felt.)
Interestingly I discovered that most of the Oligarchs who occupy the villas from in and around Cap Ferrat are more likely to be Ukrainian than Russian which probably explains why their visible numbers didnt seem to reduce despite being persona non grata in France. To the untrained eye they are difficult to tell apart as is their language. Only their number plates
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
What about if you don't want to run a business? Whatever you do you will need basic English and Maths. If you don't have that you won't have the English skills to read a contract or the numeracy skills to book keep or do your tax returns anyway.
If you don't have any language skills you won't be much use exporting and importing from the Continent either. History is vital to understand your culture and global cultures
I mentioned basic maths and reading, as to languages you are talking bollocks the language of business is english and meeting someone in a business context that doesn't speak english is rare to vanishing. As to history its a good hobby but helps few people get on in life unless they are making a job as a professional historian.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely.
I also wonder, judging from my school days, how much of the acting up done by pupils is because they are bored because they don't really see the point of what they are being taught. The "Why do I need to learn calculus when I can just goto a website and plug in the numbers in the unlikely event I will ever need it" . Now I can do calculus standing on my head and despite having worked in both chemistry and physics labs before I became a software engineer I don't think I have ever needed to use it in anger. Learning stats to a deeper level on the other hand would have been a lot more useful
Yup. I'm struggling to teach a kid simple addition and reading right now. But she draws and paints at gallery standard already. It's obvious at age 12 that's what she'll do for a living. She's quite exceptional.
And it would be better for education to be tailored to her than tailoring her for education which is what we currently do
Parliament. The Met. Other police forces. The NHS. The Army. The London Fire Brigade.
Now another fire service.
Could these men just learn to behave, for crying out loud. It's not that hard.
And if they can't could they just piss off to some remote part of the world and behave like priapic baboons with each other and leave civilised people in peace. Thanks.
Other parts of the world have their own problems. This is not a headline I think acceptable, but it reflects the social reality there.
Is non-consensual sex not rape?
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/02/113_344628.html … In recent years, women's rights groups and civic activists, who claim that the existing rape law is outdated and insufficient to protect the victims, have been strongly demanding the legal definition of rape to be expanded to include non-consensual sex.
But the idea has drawn fierce backlash from some men who believe that a consent-based definition of rape may result in an increase of false rape accusations. They view that whether the sexual activity was consensual or non-consensual will be difficult to confirm in court proceedings.
The thorny issue was spotlighted again recently after the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family retracted a plan to review revisions to the rape law to include non-consensual sex, a few hours after it was announced…
… Rep. Kweon Seong-dong of the ruling People Power Party (PPP) claimed that the proposed revision will only worsen gender conflicts.
"Such a law may result in possible false rape allegations. It will be highly difficult to determine a criminal offense based only on a victim's claim," he wrote on Facebook. The lawmaker also said that state intervention over individuals' sexual activities, which are considered a private matter, should be limited to a minimum level. ..
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely.
I also wonder, judging from my school days, how much of the acting up done by pupils is because they are bored because they don't really see the point of what they are being taught. The "Why do I need to learn calculus when I can just goto a website and plug in the numbers in the unlikely event I will ever need it" . Now I can do calculus standing on my head and despite having worked in both chemistry and physics labs before I became a software engineer I don't think I have ever needed to use it in anger. Learning stats to a deeper level on the other hand would have been a lot more useful
Yup. I'm struggling to teach a kid simple addition and reading right now. But she draws and paints at gallery standard already. It's obvious at age 12 that's what she'll do for a living. She's quite exceptional.
And it would be better for education to be tailored to her than tailoring her for education which is what we currently do
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
What about if you don't want to run a business? Whatever you do you will need basic English and Maths. If you don't have that you won't have the English skills to read a contract or the numeracy skills to book keep or do your tax returns anyway.
If you don't have any language skills you won't be much use exporting and importing from the Continent either. History is vital to understand your culture and global cultures
I mentioned basic maths and reading, as to languages you are talking bollocks the language of business is english and meeting someone in a business context that doesn't speak english is rare to vanishing. As to history its a good hobby but helps few people get on in life unless they are making a job as a professional historian.
Just the height of arrogance to say all foreigners speak English and we don't need to bother. In my experience the French and Germans for example will be more helpful if you make the effort to speak their language and Mandarin is growing in importance in international business too, as is Spanish in terms of Latin America.
Having some knowledge of your culture is vital to understanding your area and nation, not just for historians
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely.
I also wonder, judging from my school days, how much of the acting up done by pupils is because they are bored because they don't really see the point of what they are being taught. The "Why do I need to learn calculus when I can just goto a website and plug in the numbers in the unlikely event I will ever need it" . Now I can do calculus standing on my head and despite having worked in both chemistry and physics labs before I became a software engineer I don't think I have ever needed to use it in anger. Learning stats to a deeper level on the other hand would have been a lot more useful
Yup. I'm struggling to teach a kid simple addition and reading right now. But she draws and paints at gallery standard already. It's obvious at age 12 that's what she'll do for a living. She's quite exceptional.
And it would be better for education to be tailored to her than tailoring her for education which is what we currently do
Spot on.
shrugs education should be about helping people reach their full potential not forcing them into a one size fits no one mould. I suspect this is why so many entrepreneurs have been educational dropouts, they refused to be browbeaten into the school=>uni=>marriage=>work for the man moulds from an early point in life and that to my mind is what our system does.
On topic. You are right to keep flagging this point up in multiple threads Mike. In fact I can help you. I think there is evidence of a drift back towards the Tories ALREADY UNDERWAY.
The yougov today with Labours lead falling and more importantly the Tory % firm was another good poll for the Conservatives in what becoming a heartening sequence of closing the gap for them. In the yougov sequence alone this winter (which is how we should read polls) it was 3 or 4 points lower but has leaped up and stuck to where it is now without dropping back. Yougov is a indisputable example of the Tories now clearly polling 3% higher than they were some months back. This winter, despite everything, they have put on a hefty 3% more voters.
The reason why trends like this in the polling now is important, is this is still midterm and a crisis for the country at least on par with the 70s leading to winter of discontent - there just cannot be a worse economic or political set of narratives to poll a government against, so the progress Tories are making in polls in such stormy weather as this has to cheer them - not to the extent of excited about re-election, but it is suggestive of a polling comeback to salvage 250 seats or more come the election, which would, thanks to 45-55 SNP leave Labour way short.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely.
I also wonder, judging from my school days, how much of the acting up done by pupils is because they are bored because they don't really see the point of what they are being taught. The "Why do I need to learn calculus when I can just goto a website and plug in the numbers in the unlikely event I will ever need it" . Now I can do calculus standing on my head and despite having worked in both chemistry and physics labs before I became a software engineer I don't think I have ever needed to use it in anger. Learning stats to a deeper level on the other hand would have been a lot more useful
Yup. I'm struggling to teach a kid simple addition and reading right now. But she draws and paints at gallery standard already. It's obvious at age 12 that's what she'll do for a living. She's quite exceptional.
And it would be better for education to be tailored to her than tailoring her for education which is what we currently do
Spot on.
So you both think that if the so-called education system has failed a 12yo to such an extent that she can't add up or read, don't bother teaching her those skills because she can realise "her potential" doing stuff that doesn't require them. Why not raise some children to communicate only by grunting, if it's all they're good for?
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
What about if you don't want to run a business? Whatever you do you will need basic English and Maths. If you don't have that you won't have the English skills to read a contract or the numeracy skills to book keep or do your tax returns anyway.
If you don't have any language skills you won't be much use exporting and importing from the Continent either. History is vital to understand your culture and global cultures
I mentioned basic maths and reading, as to languages you are talking bollocks the language of business is english and meeting someone in a business context that doesn't speak english is rare to vanishing. As to history its a good hobby but helps few people get on in life unless they are making a job as a professional historian.
Just the height of arrogance to say all foreigners speak English and we don't need to bother. In my experience the French and Germans for example will be more helpful if you make the effort to speak their language and Mandarin is growing in importance in international business too, as is Spanish in terms of Latin America.
Having some knowledge of your culture is vital to understanding your area and nation, not just for historians
1) It is not arrogance its a fact simple as that I regulary talk to people all over the world in my leisure time, only once have I come across someone that spoke no english and they were finnish. Guess what we still managed to chat via google translate. Other than one person I have never met a european that doesn't talk english to an understandable level. In fact mostly you try and learn their language they still prefer to use english so they can practise (lots of swedish friends and wanted to learn swedish as was thinking of moving their, but they were no speak english so we can practise)
2) Frankly unless you can posit an answer to this challenge then you are talking bollocks about history. Show me an example when a lack of knowledge of Oliver Cromwell is going to hinder my life....yes I know who Cromwell was and what he did but was amazed my son didnt despite doing a history gcse.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
What about if you don't want to run a business? Whatever you do you will need basic English and Maths. If you don't have that you won't have the English skills to read a contract or the numeracy skills to book keep or do your tax returns anyway.
If you don't have any language skills you won't be much use exporting and importing from the Continent either. History is vital to understand your culture and global cultures
I mentioned basic maths and reading, as to languages you are talking bollocks the language of business is english and meeting someone in a business context that doesn't speak english is rare to vanishing. As to history its a good hobby but helps few people get on in life unless they are making a job as a professional historian.
Just the height of arrogance to say all foreigners speak English and we don't need to bother. In my experience the French and Germans for example will be more helpful if you make the effort to speak their language and Mandarin is growing in importance in international business too, as is Spanish in terms of Latin America.
Having some knowledge of your culture is vital to understanding your area and nation, not just for historians
1) It is not arrogance its a fact simple as that I regulary talk to people all over the world in my leisure time, only once have I come across someone that spoke no english and they were finnish. Guess what we still managed to chat via google translate. Other than one person I have never met a european that doesn't talk english to an understandable level. In fact mostly you try and learn their language they still prefer to use english so they can practise (lots of swedish friends and wanted to learn swedish as was thinking of moving their, but they were no speak english so we can practise)
Possible to get by, thanks to an advertising company, without much education... Must be a good thing then.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely.
I also wonder, judging from my school days, how much of the acting up done by pupils is because they are bored because they don't really see the point of what they are being taught. The "Why do I need to learn calculus when I can just goto a website and plug in the numbers in the unlikely event I will ever need it" . Now I can do calculus standing on my head and despite having worked in both chemistry and physics labs before I became a software engineer I don't think I have ever needed to use it in anger. Learning stats to a deeper level on the other hand would have been a lot more useful
Yup. I'm struggling to teach a kid simple addition and reading right now. But she draws and paints at gallery standard already. It's obvious at age 12 that's what she'll do for a living. She's quite exceptional.
And it would be better for education to be tailored to her than tailoring her for education which is what we currently do
Spot on.
So you both think that if the so-called education system has failed a 12yo to such an extent that she can't add up or read, don't bother teaching her those skills because she can realise "her potential" doing stuff that doesn't require them. Why not raise some children to communicate only by grunting, if it's all they're good for?
Do fuck off neither of us was saying that, what we were saying though is she probably doesn't need to be able to do calculus, or algerbra or trigonometry. Its never going to be important to her.
Yes she should know how to do addition, subtraction, percentages, multiplication and division and some basic bookkeeping/ budgetting skills. I doubt very much she will need more than that so why spend hours every week for 6 more years trying to teach her stuff she is so unlikely to need. Better she uses the time learning something actually relevant to the rest of her life
Parliament. The Met. Other police forces. The NHS. The Army. The London Fire Brigade.
Now another fire service.
Could these men just learn to behave, for crying out loud. It's not that hard.
And if they can't could they just piss off to some remote part of the world and behave like priapic baboons with each other and leave civilised people in peace. Thanks.
Other parts of the world have their own problems. This is not a headline I think acceptable, but it reflects the social reality there.
Is non-consensual sex not rape?
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/02/113_344628.html … In recent years, women's rights groups and civic activists, who claim that the existing rape law is outdated and insufficient to protect the victims, have been strongly demanding the legal definition of rape to be expanded to include non-consensual sex.
But the idea has drawn fierce backlash from some men who believe that a consent-based definition of rape may result in an increase of false rape accusations. They view that whether the sexual activity was consensual or non-consensual will be difficult to confirm in court proceedings.
The thorny issue was spotlighted again recently after the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family retracted a plan to review revisions to the rape law to include non-consensual sex, a few hours after it was announced…
… Rep. Kweon Seong-dong of the ruling People Power Party (PPP) claimed that the proposed revision will only worsen gender conflicts.
"Such a law may result in possible false rape allegations. It will be highly difficult to determine a criminal offense based only on a victim's claim," he wrote on Facebook. The lawmaker also said that state intervention over individuals' sexual activities, which are considered a private matter, should be limited to a minimum level. ..
What the hell is non-consensual sex if it isn't rape?
Honestly a lot of men - whether here or abroad - seem to think that women just exist to serve men, as a sort of wallpaper to men's lives and needs. As if we don't exist for real, for ourselves.
It is very very tiresome. A lot of men really need to grow up.
To those on the site who are worried that the BBC reporting on crime committed by police officers in America is dangerous because it gives the impression that our police are anything but whiter than white.
A 1970s British film on obscure cinema channel Talking Pictures in the small hours entitled 'All Coppers are......''
Big moves in Ukraine in what looks like an anti corruption apcampaign.
Multiple resignations, indictments, and seizures by law enforcement in Kyiv. Top oligarchs are targeted, too, inlcuding Kolomoyskyi and Firtash. Zelensky appears to use the momentum to push against some of the oligarchs and deep state. Details in this thread https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1620799910223417345
Kolomoisky, or "Benya" with the office shark tank who sends his enemies coffins, has been under investigation by a US grand jury for some time. He is subject to US sanctions. Some of his assets in London have been frozen.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
What about if you don't want to run a business? Whatever you do you will need basic English and Maths. If you don't have that you won't have the English skills to read a contract or the numeracy skills to book keep or do your tax returns anyway.
If you don't have any language skills you won't be much use exporting and importing from the Continent either. History is vital to understand your culture and global cultures
I mentioned basic maths and reading, as to languages you are talking bollocks the language of business is english and meeting someone in a business context that doesn't speak english is rare to vanishing. As to history its a good hobby but helps few people get on in life unless they are making a job as a professional historian.
Just the height of arrogance to say all foreigners speak English and we don't need to bother. In my experience the French and Germans for example will be more helpful if you make the effort to speak their language and Mandarin is growing in importance in international business too, as is Spanish in terms of Latin America.
Having some knowledge of your culture is vital to understanding your area and nation, not just for historians
1) It is not arrogance its a fact simple as that I regulary talk to people all over the world in my leisure time, only once have I come across someone that spoke no english and they were finnish. Guess what we still managed to chat via google translate. Other than one person I have never met a european that doesn't talk english to an understandable level. In fact mostly you try and learn their language they still prefer to use english so they can practise (lots of swedish friends and wanted to learn swedish as was thinking of moving their, but they were no speak english so we can practise)
2) Frankly unless you can posit an answer to this challenge then you are talking bollocks about history. Show me an example when a lack of knowledge of Oliver Cromwell is going to hinder my life....yes I know who Cromwell was and what he did but was amazed my son didnt despite doing a history gcse.
In your leisure time, not in business when speaking fluently another language is an asset, not least as you know what they are saying when they speak to each other not in English.
You can't understand much about your town or village or city or indeed our democracy without history, or indeed much of the news from the Middle East to Brexit to Northern Ireland to Remembrance Day
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely.
I also wonder, judging from my school days, how much of the acting up done by pupils is because they are bored because they don't really see the point of what they are being taught. The "Why do I need to learn calculus when I can just goto a website and plug in the numbers in the unlikely event I will ever need it" . Now I can do calculus standing on my head and despite having worked in both chemistry and physics labs before I became a software engineer I don't think I have ever needed to use it in anger. Learning stats to a deeper level on the other hand would have been a lot more useful
Yup. I'm struggling to teach a kid simple addition and reading right now. But she draws and paints at gallery standard already. It's obvious at age 12 that's what she'll do for a living. She's quite exceptional.
And it would be better for education to be tailored to her than tailoring her for education which is what we currently do
Spot on.
So you both think that if the so-called education system has failed a 12yo to such an extent that she can't add up or read, don't bother teaching her those skills because she can realise "her potential" doing stuff that doesn't require them. Why not raise some children to communicate only by grunting, if it's all they're good for?
Do fuck off neither of us was saying that, what we were saying though is she probably doesn't need to be able to do calculus, or algerbra or trigonometry. Its never going to be important to her.
Yes she should know how to do addition, subtraction, percentages, multiplication and division and some basic bookkeeping/ budgetting skills. I doubt very much she will need more than that so why spend hours every week for 6 more years trying to teach her stuff she is so unlikely to need. Better she uses the time learning something actually relevant to the rest of her life
The way you use terms such as "potential", "relevance", and "need" is robotic. You seem to think education is stuffing this amount or that amount of stuff into someone's head, according to what is determined to be their "potential". Or is it their place in the feudal system?
Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
Obviously you can't scale down crudely like that though. NY has pretty tight gun laws, so I would expect a lower figure there. Not sure about LA. Laws are tight, but it's pretty wild in parts.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
What about if you don't want to run a business? Whatever you do you will need basic English and Maths. If you don't have that you won't have the English skills to read a contract or the numeracy skills to book keep or do your tax returns anyway.
If you don't have any language skills you won't be much use exporting and importing from the Continent either. History is vital to understand your culture and global cultures
I mentioned basic maths and reading, as to languages you are talking bollocks the language of business is english and meeting someone in a business context that doesn't speak english is rare to vanishing. As to history its a good hobby but helps few people get on in life unless they are making a job as a professional historian.
Just the height of arrogance to say all foreigners speak English and we don't need to bother. In my experience the French and Germans for example will be more helpful if you make the effort to speak their language and Mandarin is growing in importance in international business too, as is Spanish in terms of Latin America.
Having some knowledge of your culture is vital to understanding your area and nation, not just for historians
1) It is not arrogance its a fact simple as that I regulary talk to people all over the world in my leisure time, only once have I come across someone that spoke no english and they were finnish. Guess what we still managed to chat via google translate. Other than one person I have never met a european that doesn't talk english to an understandable level. In fact mostly you try and learn their language they still prefer to use english so they can practise (lots of swedish friends and wanted to learn swedish as was thinking of moving their, but they were no speak english so we can practise)
2) Frankly unless you can posit an answer to this challenge then you are talking bollocks about history. Show me an example when a lack of knowledge of Oliver Cromwell is going to hinder my life....yes I know who Cromwell was and what he did but was amazed my son didnt despite doing a history gcse.
In your leisure time, not in business when speaking fluently another language is an asset, not least as you know what they are saying when they speak to each other not in English.
You can't understand much about your town or village or city or indeed our democracy without history, or indeed much of the news from the Middle East to Brexit to Northern Ireland to Remembrance Day
Well I understand more than you because you believe the history of the country is the history of the tory party.
I have worked in plenty of multi national companies with international teams and I can assure you english is the lingua franca of business and you claiming its not speaks more to your ignorance than mine
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely.
I also wonder, judging from my school days, how much of the acting up done by pupils is because they are bored because they don't really see the point of what they are being taught. The "Why do I need to learn calculus when I can just goto a website and plug in the numbers in the unlikely event I will ever need it" . Now I can do calculus standing on my head and despite having worked in both chemistry and physics labs before I became a software engineer I don't think I have ever needed to use it in anger. Learning stats to a deeper level on the other hand would have been a lot more useful
Yup. I'm struggling to teach a kid simple addition and reading right now. But she draws and paints at gallery standard already. It's obvious at age 12 that's what she'll do for a living. She's quite exceptional.
And it would be better for education to be tailored to her than tailoring her for education which is what we currently do
Spot on.
So you both think that if the so-called education system has failed a 12yo to such an extent that she can't add up or read, don't bother teaching her those skills because she can realise "her potential" doing stuff that doesn't require them. Why not raise some children to communicate only by grunting, if it's all they're good for?
Do fuck off neither of us was saying that, what we were saying though is she probably doesn't need to be able to do calculus, or algerbra or trigonometry. Its never going to be important to her.
Yes she should know how to do addition, subtraction, percentages, multiplication and division and some basic bookkeeping/ budgetting skills. I doubt very much she will need more than that so why spend hours every week for 6 more years trying to teach her stuff she is so unlikely to need. Better she uses the time learning something actually relevant to the rest of her life
The way you use terms such as "potential", "relevance", and "need" is robotic. You seem to think education is stuffing this amount or that amount of stuff into someone's head, according to what is determined to be their "potential". Or is it their place in the feudal system?
Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
Thanks, interesting.
Re point 3) Doesn't that still apply to books you sell to the EU?
Anyway, I am glad your business is doing well.
PS Why is "Some Unusual Engines" by L J K Setright so expensive? I used to have a copy and lent it to someone, never got it back. Whenever I look to get a replacement copy it's always well over £100, so I demur.
Just get the local library to order it for you, say you've lost it and pay them the tenner or whatever. That's how I get my hard to find books.
Big moves in Ukraine in what looks like an anti corruption apcampaign.
Multiple resignations, indictments, and seizures by law enforcement in Kyiv. Top oligarchs are targeted, too, inlcuding Kolomoyskyi and Firtash. Zelensky appears to use the momentum to push against some of the oligarchs and deep state. Details in this thread https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1620799910223417345
The Ukrainian refugee grapvine reports that the conscription evasion bribe has now gone from €5k to €20k! That's inflation and possibly a sign of a corruption crackdown.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely.
I also wonder, judging from my school days, how much of the acting up done by pupils is because they are bored because they don't really see the point of what they are being taught. The "Why do I need to learn calculus when I can just goto a website and plug in the numbers in the unlikely event I will ever need it" . Now I can do calculus standing on my head and despite having worked in both chemistry and physics labs before I became a software engineer I don't think I have ever needed to use it in anger. Learning stats to a deeper level on the other hand would have been a lot more useful
Yup. I'm struggling to teach a kid simple addition and reading right now. But she draws and paints at gallery standard already. It's obvious at age 12 that's what she'll do for a living. She's quite exceptional.
And it would be better for education to be tailored to her than tailoring her for education which is what we currently do
Spot on.
So you both think that if the so-called education system has failed a 12yo to such an extent that she can't add up or read, don't bother teaching her those skills because she can realise "her potential" doing stuff that doesn't require them. Why not raise some children to communicate only by grunting, if it's all they're good for?
Do fuck off neither of us was saying that, what we were saying though is she probably doesn't need to be able to do calculus, or algerbra or trigonometry. Its never going to be important to her.
Yes she should know how to do addition, subtraction, percentages, multiplication and division and some basic bookkeeping/ budgetting skills. I doubt very much she will need more than that so why spend hours every week for 6 more years trying to teach her stuff she is so unlikely to need. Better she uses the time learning something actually relevant to the rest of her life
The way you use terms such as "potential", "relevance", and "need" is robotic. You seem to think education is stuffing this amount or that amount of stuff into someone's head, according to what is determined to be their "potential". Or is it their place in the feudal system?
Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
I won't click on that. You're referring again to a service run by an advertising company.
You may feel you only need educationally whatever is functional for you in your job working with software - oh and for counting money. Someone who is educated properly as a child goes on learning stuff all their lives, way beyond what they "need" for a job.
You are showing a dismal level of understanding here of what education, mathematics, language, historical knowledge, and cultural interchange are all about, as well as the critical thought that you mentioned, but yeah, I get it, "fuck off", "Russian troll", and see if you care.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely.
I also wonder, judging from my school days, how much of the acting up done by pupils is because they are bored because they don't really see the point of what they are being taught. The "Why do I need to learn calculus when I can just goto a website and plug in the numbers in the unlikely event I will ever need it" . Now I can do calculus standing on my head and despite having worked in both chemistry and physics labs before I became a software engineer I don't think I have ever needed to use it in anger. Learning stats to a deeper level on the other hand would have been a lot more useful
Yup. I'm struggling to teach a kid simple addition and reading right now. But she draws and paints at gallery standard already. It's obvious at age 12 that's what she'll do for a living. She's quite exceptional.
And it would be better for education to be tailored to her than tailoring her for education which is what we currently do
Spot on.
shrugs education should be about helping people reach their full potential not forcing them into a one size fits no one mould. I suspect this is why so many entrepreneurs have been educational dropouts, they refused to be browbeaten into the school=>uni=>marriage=>work for the man moulds from an early point in life and that to my mind is what our system does.
Free the potential, feel the growth
Most of the dropouts did it to start their new business, rather than because they thought education was worthless. Indeed, Bill Gates has always said he regretted dropping out,
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
Of those, I think the VAT one is by far the largest*, because the rules for charging VAT in the EU on cross border sales were a total, fucking nightmare for small and midsized businesses.
* I'm not convinced that 1 will remain around forever.
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
Thanks, interesting.
Re point 3) Doesn't that still apply to books you sell to the EU?
Anyway, I am glad your business is doing well.
PS Why is "Some Unusual Engines" by L J K Setright so expensive? I used to have a copy and lent it to someone, never got it back. Whenever I look to get a replacement copy it's always well over £100, so I demur.
Just get the local library to order it for you, say you've lost it and pay them the tenner or whatever. That's how I get my hard to find books.
What is your take on the Story on Front of Telegraph, Ace?
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
Absolutely.
I also wonder, judging from my school days, how much of the acting up done by pupils is because they are bored because they don't really see the point of what they are being taught. The "Why do I need to learn calculus when I can just goto a website and plug in the numbers in the unlikely event I will ever need it" . Now I can do calculus standing on my head and despite having worked in both chemistry and physics labs before I became a software engineer I don't think I have ever needed to use it in anger. Learning stats to a deeper level on the other hand would have been a lot more useful
Yup. I'm struggling to teach a kid simple addition and reading right now. But she draws and paints at gallery standard already. It's obvious at age 12 that's what she'll do for a living. She's quite exceptional.
And it would be better for education to be tailored to her than tailoring her for education which is what we currently do
Spot on.
shrugs education should be about helping people reach their full potential not forcing them into a one size fits no one mould. I suspect this is why so many entrepreneurs have been educational dropouts, they refused to be browbeaten into the school=>uni=>marriage=>work for the man moulds from an early point in life and that to my mind is what our system does.
Free the potential, feel the growth
Most of the dropouts did it to start their new business, rather than because they thought education was worthless. Indeed, Bill Gates has always said he regretted dropping out,
I was not saying education is useless I am a strong believer in education, I am just not a strong believer that all children should be tried to fit into the same mould style of education. Education should fit the child not the child fit the education. We would raise more happy, fulfilled adults that way
Big moves in Ukraine in what looks like an anti corruption apcampaign.
Multiple resignations, indictments, and seizures by law enforcement in Kyiv. Top oligarchs are targeted, too, inlcuding Kolomoyskyi and Firtash. Zelensky appears to use the momentum to push against some of the oligarchs and deep state. Details in this thread https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1620799910223417345
If ever there was a time they could marshal the will and support to transform their society, one would expect it would be now. Hopefully it will work.
Sunak of course had a golden opportunity to throw Braverman to the wolves in the first week or so of his premiership.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Not sure how much opportunity there really was. He was never in a very strong position.
A leader’s mana is usually highest when they first take power.
Sunak obviously did a deal with Braverman, and that got him over the line. However she managed to fuck things up immediately and he passed over the opportunity to take advantage.
Such timidity says everything about his chances of winning the next election.
Sunak needed to display the brutality of power that Johnson did, and cull all the cabinet he didn't like, shortly to be followed by culling the backbenchers who oppose him.
He didn't, so his cabinet is a mixed bag of loonies, time servers owed favours and incompetents.
Unlike in 2019, it isn't 20 odd people who disagree with him.
C. 100 Tory backbenchers probably think the state is too big (the blue wall)
C. 75 Tory backbenchers think the state is too small (the levelling uppers)
C. 25 Tory backbenchers won't be continuing past the next GE
There is too high a risk of being ousted by either side. Sunak seems to think by becoming a do nothing uncontroversial govt he might make it through. Johnson's political nous was to realise that the 100 blue wallers could be bought off in one way, and the 75 levelling uppers in another, cancelling each other out. If he hadn't have sacked Cummings I think he'd still be bestriding British politics, as Tim Shipman said, 'like a Giant toad'....
Hi Mortimer, good to see you posting.
Yesterday you said: "Brexit makes my business life inordinately easier than it would be if we were still in the EU."
I was genuinely interested in how and why that is since as far as I can see every other business is seeing Brexit as neutral or negative.
Hi Ben,
Here are a few examples:
1) When we were in the EU, I had more European dealers competing with me to buy stock in the UK. That has largely stopped now, or rather, has diminished. So my margins on some products have increased whilst my retail prices have remained the same.
2) The EU regulation of antiques (including books) coming into the EU customs union has drastically increased, apparently to reduce crime (smuggling) and terrorism, even when the law enforcement agencies (I think it was Interpol) were relatively hazy about the impact this would have. So I don't have to worry about import certificates if, say, I buy something from the US or Australia
3) The EU cross border VAT rate changes would have been a sodding nightmare for booksellers - as in the UK books are zero rated but not in pretty much every other EU nation. So some rather convoluted accounting for goods sold to end users in different EU countries.
I recognise I'm in a sweet spot both business wise (selling largely english language books), scale wise (I'm mid-sized for my industry), and industry wise (we're a niche product), but honestly, being out is a huge huge boon for me.
Thanks, interesting.
Re point 3) Doesn't that still apply to books you sell to the EU?
Anyway, I am glad your business is doing well.
PS Why is "Some Unusual Engines" by L J K Setright so expensive? I used to have a copy and lent it to someone, never got it back. Whenever I look to get a replacement copy it's always well over £100, so I demur.
Just get the local library to order it for you, say you've lost it and pay them the tenner or whatever. That's how I get my hard to find books.
What is your take on the Story on Front of Telegraph, Ace?
All for it. White cismales should be actively discriminated against for recruitment and promotion.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
What about if you don't want to run a business? Whatever you do you will need basic English and Maths. If you don't have that you won't have the English skills to read a contract or the numeracy skills to book keep or do your tax returns anyway.
If you don't have any language skills you won't be much use exporting and importing from the Continent either. History is vital to understand your culture and global cultures
I mentioned basic maths and reading, as to languages you are talking bollocks the language of business is english and meeting someone in a business context that doesn't speak english is rare to vanishing. As to history its a good hobby but helps few people get on in life unless they are making a job as a professional historian.
Just the height of arrogance to say all foreigners speak English and we don't need to bother. In my experience the French and Germans for example will be more helpful if you make the effort to speak their language and Mandarin is growing in importance in international business too, as is Spanish in terms of Latin America.
Having some knowledge of your culture is vital to understanding your area and nation, not just for historians
1) It is not arrogance its a fact simple as that I regulary talk to people all over the world in my leisure time, only once have I come across someone that spoke no english and they were finnish. Guess what we still managed to chat via google translate. Other than one person I have never met a european that doesn't talk english to an understandable level. In fact mostly you try and learn their language they still prefer to use english so they can practise (lots of swedish friends and wanted to learn swedish as was thinking of moving their, but they were no speak english so we can practise)
2) Frankly unless you can posit an answer to this challenge then you are talking bollocks about history. Show me an example when a lack of knowledge of Oliver Cromwell is going to hinder my life....yes I know who Cromwell was and what he did but was amazed my son didnt despite doing a history gcse.
In your leisure time, not in business when speaking fluently another language is an asset, not least as you know what they are saying when they speak to each other not in English.
You can't understand much about your town or village or city or indeed our democracy without history, or indeed much of the news from the Middle East to Brexit to Northern Ireland to Remembrance Day
Well I understand more than you because you believe the history of the country is the history of the tory party.
I have worked in plenty of multi national companies with international teams and I can assure you english is the lingua franca of business and you claiming its not speaks more to your ignorance than mine
I really regret not knowing a foreign language, but for commerce you are absolutely right. I organised a lot of European conferences. Every one was conducted in English. At one, at which I was also a presenter I was the only British attendee yet it was entirely conducted in English.
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
In April we will see the Pensioners get 10.1%, while the workers get stuffed again. No wonder they strike.
Was berated by an angry pensioner today. Holiday every six weeks and I want a pay rise. Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Internally consistent I suppose. Pay rises for public sector workers will almost certainty sustain price inflation.
That’s just echoing the government bullshit line. How far below inflation would you say the public sector should be settling - how big of a pay reduction ?
Somewhere around the same level as private sector. 5-6% avg rise?
The answer in a capitalist society is surely whatever the market decides, based on supply vs demand.
The public sector is not part of the capitalist society though if the market decides the job pays more than a company can afford the company goes bust or learns to manage with fewer workers by introducing productivity improvements.
The public sector just dips it's hands deeper in our pockets
Of course it’s a market, unless you plan to force people to work in the health service of teaching as a form of national service. They can - and do, in ever increasing numbers - vote with their feet and leave for less stressful better paid private sector jobs.
The solution is either to pay much more, or significantly increase immigration to plug the gaps. Our economically illiterate government wants to do neither, then wonders why there are staff shortages.
Then the public sector can learn to do more with less people and stop wasting money on pet projects. Simple as that just like private sector companies have to when they can't afford pay rises.
We keep hearing for example that there are more people applying for nursing courses than places so seems to me the scarcity is artificial. We also have more nurses than ever before currently which suggests that despite the furore about vacancies there are plenty still wanting to be a nurse.
It’s not an inconsistent view, and on some level I agree (as I often do with your analysis).
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
I didn't say do less, I said learn to do more with less. An example might be for example 20% of teachers time is taken up with beauracracy (example no idea of the figure but those in teaching always seem to be complaining about the paperwork).
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
It may be a surprise to you but I agree wholeheartedly. The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles. Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?" I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
I suspect our answers may well be different however the first step is having the conversation. We just can't keep adding to debt. Our interest payments are above 10% of government income and rising and sooner or later we will not be able to borrow without plans to cut spending savagely the longer we leave it.
Well. There you go. Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views. What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4. 1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes. 2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. 3. A way of matching skills to employers to increase efficiency and productivity. 4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once. Badly.
I would say it is none of the 4 personally
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
What about if you don't want to run a business? Whatever you do you will need basic English and Maths. If you don't have that you won't have the English skills to read a contract or the numeracy skills to book keep or do your tax returns anyway.
If you don't have any language skills you won't be much use exporting and importing from the Continent either. History is vital to understand your culture and global cultures
I mentioned basic maths and reading, as to languages you are talking bollocks the language of business is english and meeting someone in a business context that doesn't speak english is rare to vanishing. As to history its a good hobby but helps few people get on in life unless they are making a job as a professional historian.
Just the height of arrogance to say all foreigners speak English and we don't need to bother. In my experience the French and Germans for example will be more helpful if you make the effort to speak their language and Mandarin is growing in importance in international business too, as is Spanish in terms of Latin America.
Having some knowledge of your culture is vital to understanding your area and nation, not just for historians
1) It is not arrogance its a fact simple as that I regulary talk to people all over the world in my leisure time, only once have I come across someone that spoke no english and they were finnish. Guess what we still managed to chat via google translate. Other than one person I have never met a european that doesn't talk english to an understandable level. In fact mostly you try and learn their language they still prefer to use english so they can practise (lots of swedish friends and wanted to learn swedish as was thinking of moving their, but they were no speak english so we can practise)
2) Frankly unless you can posit an answer to this challenge then you are talking bollocks about history. Show me an example when a lack of knowledge of Oliver Cromwell is going to hinder my life....yes I know who Cromwell was and what he did but was amazed my son didnt despite doing a history gcse.
In your leisure time, not in business when speaking fluently another language is an asset, not least as you know what they are saying when they speak to each other not in English.
You can't understand much about your town or village or city or indeed our democracy without history, or indeed much of the news from the Middle East to Brexit to Northern Ireland to Remembrance Day
Well I understand more than you because you believe the history of the country is the history of the tory party.
I have worked in plenty of multi national companies with international teams and I can assure you english is the lingua franca of business and you claiming its not speaks more to your ignorance than mine
I really regret not knowing a foreign language, but for commerce you are absolutely right. I organised a lot of European conferences. Every one was conducted in English. At one, at which I was also a presenter I was the only British attendee yet it was entirely conducted in English.
I am not against learning foreign languages, just dispute it adds anything in most peoples business life. If you like languages by all means learn them
Parliament. The Met. Other police forces. The NHS. The Army. The London Fire Brigade.
Now another fire service.
Could these men just learn to behave, for crying out loud. It's not that hard.
And if they can't could they just piss off to some remote part of the world and behave like priapic baboons with each other and leave civilised people in peace. Thanks.
Other parts of the world have their own problems. This is not a headline I think acceptable, but it reflects the social reality there.
Is non-consensual sex not rape?
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/02/113_344628.html … In recent years, women's rights groups and civic activists, who claim that the existing rape law is outdated and insufficient to protect the victims, have been strongly demanding the legal definition of rape to be expanded to include non-consensual sex.
But the idea has drawn fierce backlash from some men who believe that a consent-based definition of rape may result in an increase of false rape accusations. They view that whether the sexual activity was consensual or non-consensual will be difficult to confirm in court proceedings.
The thorny issue was spotlighted again recently after the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family retracted a plan to review revisions to the rape law to include non-consensual sex, a few hours after it was announced…
… Rep. Kweon Seong-dong of the ruling People Power Party (PPP) claimed that the proposed revision will only worsen gender conflicts.
"Such a law may result in possible false rape allegations. It will be highly difficult to determine a criminal offense based only on a victim's claim," he wrote on Facebook. The lawmaker also said that state intervention over individuals' sexual activities, which are considered a private matter, should be limited to a minimum level. ..
What the hell is non-consensual sex if it isn't rape?
Honestly a lot of men - whether here or abroad - seem to think that women just exist to serve men, as a sort of wallpaper to men's lives and needs. As if we don't exist for real, for ourselves.
It is very very tiresome. A lot of men really need to grow up.
I have to admit I always thought non-consensual sex was the actual definition of rape. I assume that is the legal definition in this country at least?
Parliament. The Met. Other police forces. The NHS. The Army. The London Fire Brigade.
Now another fire service.
Could these men just learn to behave, for crying out loud. It's not that hard.
And if they can't could they just piss off to some remote part of the world and behave like priapic baboons with each other and leave civilised people in peace. Thanks.
Other parts of the world have their own problems. This is not a headline I think acceptable, but it reflects the social reality there.
Is non-consensual sex not rape?
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/02/113_344628.html … In recent years, women's rights groups and civic activists, who claim that the existing rape law is outdated and insufficient to protect the victims, have been strongly demanding the legal definition of rape to be expanded to include non-consensual sex.
But the idea has drawn fierce backlash from some men who believe that a consent-based definition of rape may result in an increase of false rape accusations. They view that whether the sexual activity was consensual or non-consensual will be difficult to confirm in court proceedings.
The thorny issue was spotlighted again recently after the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family retracted a plan to review revisions to the rape law to include non-consensual sex, a few hours after it was announced…
… Rep. Kweon Seong-dong of the ruling People Power Party (PPP) claimed that the proposed revision will only worsen gender conflicts.
"Such a law may result in possible false rape allegations. It will be highly difficult to determine a criminal offense based only on a victim's claim," he wrote on Facebook. The lawmaker also said that state intervention over individuals' sexual activities, which are considered a private matter, should be limited to a minimum level. ..
What the hell is non-consensual sex if it isn't rape?
Honestly a lot of men - whether here or abroad - seem to think that women just exist to serve men, as a sort of wallpaper to men's lives and needs. As if we don't exist for real, for ourselves.
It is very very tiresome. A lot of men really need to grow up.
I have to admit I always thought non-consensual sex was the actual definition of rape. I assume that is the legal definition in this country at least?
I suspect non consensual sex covers things such as agreeing to sex with a condom but they fail to use one or they agreed to sex the night before then in the morning you do an encore starting while they are still asleep. So a certain assumption of consent without actually obtaining it. Not defending either just making a guess at the difference
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
The issue there is more likely prejudice against employing the over 50s. The incentives ought to be for the employers, not the prematurely retired.
I would like to see how they got the 1.2 million figure,
by my reckoning its far too high using even today figures
Education 11 years time 7k (most born in 56 will have not gone to uni or even a levels) = 77k
Child benefit for 2 kids 35 * 52 * 18 = 32k
Pension and lets be generous and say they live till 95 hence 30 years at 10k = 300k
health care = xk unemployment = yk
total figure then is 77 + 32 + 300 + x + y = 399 + x +y
x+y therefore average 800k per person. Sorry frankly that guy is talking bollocks
Interesting analysis.
OTOH the £940k tax figure seems quite high. It's £18.8k tax per year for 50 years. I know there's VAT, and Council Tax but a person on the median UK salary of £33,2800 pa only pays £6.8k pa in Income Tax and NI.
That's what they pay now. But taking the example in the original report, someone born in 1956 would have started working in the early 70s. In the 1974 budget the standard rate of income tax was set at 33% for the first £4,500 and a sliding scale of 38-83% for anything over that. Tax free allowance was £595
Under Thatcher it went from 33% to 25% over 10 years. From 1979 onwards there was the NI contribution of between 8 and 10% on top of that. So the overall tax and NI take after your allowance was between 35% and 41%. That is for standard rate payers.
Parliament. The Met. Other police forces. The NHS. The Army. The London Fire Brigade.
Now another fire service.
Could these men just learn to behave, for crying out loud. It's not that hard.
And if they can't could they just piss off to some remote part of the world and behave like priapic baboons with each other and leave civilised people in peace. Thanks.
Other parts of the world have their own problems. This is not a headline I think acceptable, but it reflects the social reality there.
Is non-consensual sex not rape?
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/02/113_344628.html … In recent years, women's rights groups and civic activists, who claim that the existing rape law is outdated and insufficient to protect the victims, have been strongly demanding the legal definition of rape to be expanded to include non-consensual sex.
But the idea has drawn fierce backlash from some men who believe that a consent-based definition of rape may result in an increase of false rape accusations. They view that whether the sexual activity was consensual or non-consensual will be difficult to confirm in court proceedings.
The thorny issue was spotlighted again recently after the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family retracted a plan to review revisions to the rape law to include non-consensual sex, a few hours after it was announced…
… Rep. Kweon Seong-dong of the ruling People Power Party (PPP) claimed that the proposed revision will only worsen gender conflicts.
"Such a law may result in possible false rape allegations. It will be highly difficult to determine a criminal offense based only on a victim's claim," he wrote on Facebook. The lawmaker also said that state intervention over individuals' sexual activities, which are considered a private matter, should be limited to a minimum level. ..
What the hell is non-consensual sex if it isn't rape?
Honestly a lot of men - whether here or abroad - seem to think that women just exist to serve men, as a sort of wallpaper to men's lives and needs. As if we don't exist for real, for ourselves.
It is very very tiresome. A lot of men really need to grow up.
Apologies - I omitted this paragraph: Korea's Criminal Law defines the crime of rape as sexual activity against one's will involving "violence or intimidation." As such, in order to secure a rape conviction, prosecutors must prove that the perpetrator had used or threatened violence against the victim. Sexual assault against a victim in a vulnerable state, such as under the influence of alcohol or drugs, is seen as "quasi-rape."…
Social attitudes have changed massively in South Korea in recent decades, but remain quite regressive in terms of women’s rights - something which is also a strong dividing line between liberal and conservative politics. Note that the change in the law was proposed, and rejected, by the current conservative administration. Korean liberal politicians would have enacted it.
It’s not all that long ago that the UK was every bit as bad, as you will recall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_English_law#History … In January 1982, the Government accepted an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill the effect of which, if enacted, would be to compel judges to sentence men convicted of rape to imprisonment. This followed a case earlier that month in which John Allen, 33, businessman and convicted of raping a 17-year-old hitchhiker, had been fined £2,000 by Judge Bernard Richard, who alleged the victim's "contributory negligence".
Comments
The ‘line’ from government was that this is all about inflation. It’s isn’t; it’s about cutting the pay of those in the public sector.
If they are arguing in favour if that, so be it - but be honest about what they are doing.
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2023/01/31/is-the-bbcs-reporting-on-economics-impartial/
Re the book, if I had to guess I'd say demand slightly outstrips supply. But there are four copies for sale on Abebooks (including one in Gillingham for £100), so demand clearly isn't that high - I suspect some of it is past market forces (i.e. someone sold one at a good price, or historic overpricing) combined with sellers who have ready access to information (i.e. they can see that historic price of other copies and don't know any better). If it's any consolation, if I had one it would be on our £5 shelves in the porch. My only tip would be set a 'want' for it on eBay and Abebooks, and eventually someone will list one at a normal price without having looked up the others....!
Which is why Labour majority or minority is largely irrelevant.
NOM just leads to an early election (around 2 years) which leads to a majority.
Historically anyways.
That's probably the bloke I lent my copy to!
Brexit has been bad for the economy, but it hasn’t destroyed it; there are almost bound to be winners.
Either way, Kwasi's budget was totally unnecessary, beside the point, foolishly presented, and a pile of toss.
On the positive side, Rishi is now similarly poisoning the well for decline-management, and people are starting to talk about growth and what the Government is going to do about it again.
The problem at the moment is that in education, for example, we are trying to offer ever-more personalised learning for a very wide range of needs (eg more kids with special educational needs in mainstream schools, far fewer youth workers or mental health nurses around).
We either do this, and pay for it, or we back off and leave some more difficult cases to fend for themselves, eventually being picked up by the justice system.
I’m in favour of doing it properly and paying for it, amongst many other reasons because vulnerable kids matter and tend to cost a lot more to the state if they drop out of the education system.
But I have more respect for an argument that says we should try to do less in schools, than one that says we should try to do everything, just on the cheap.
If I were a dodgy donor for the Tories with a sideline in private healthcare, I’d be rubbing my hands in glee.
But then I’m not a conspiracy theorist like you are 😉
I'm trying to keep kids out of secure units.
A place in one of those costs an absolute fortune.
But I'm constantly being hampered by the failure to provide the relatively small sums which would make this much more possible.
And chief amongst those is provision of staff. If we could move from five staff to seven that would solve loads of it.
But we can't cos the pay is so uncompetitive. And no one wants to work in remedial units.
Simply being able to get mental health, ASD appointments or ADHD assessments within a few months would really help too. But all support services appear to have collapsed.
I asked three times for one example of spending or category of spending House Republicans want to cut before agreeing to raise the debt ceiling. You can watch here:
https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1620888424302673922
If you think that the electorate needs to face tough choices, then damn well level with them about your analysis.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-gun-violence-soars-in-2022/6876785.html
Ok first lets see really which of those forms actually adds any real value to educating children and cut the bits that don't. If you can reduce the paperwork by 50% of total then you have a productivity gain.
In general I agree, what we do should be properly funded. However that requires a conversation of our priorities for what the state does. If we properly fund everything we currently do I suspect most people would be paying most of their wages as tax.
This is the problem we need to address. Rank everything the state does in priority order. Work out the cost of how much to properly fund things. Then work out how much the state can realistically raise. Go from top to bottom till the government income equals the cost and everything below that has to go.
The entire problem is that this country has a tradition of pragmatism. It never thinks through from first principles.
Therefore we tinker with existing systems. Rather than debating "What is the purpose of institution X? What is it trying to achieve?"
I suspect my answer would be different to yours, but we, as a country, don't seem to ever even have the conversation.
Feds probing Santos’ role in service dog charity scheme
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/01/feds-probing-santos-service-dog-charity-scheme-00080706
… Osthoff gave the agents text messages from 2016 with Santos, who he says used his plight to raise $3,000 for life-saving surgery for the pit bull mix, Sapphire — then ghosted with the funds, as first reported by Patch.
“I’m glad to get the ball rolling with the big-wigs,” Osthoff said in an interview Wednesday. “I was worried that what happened to me was too long ago to be prosecuted.”…
Multiple resignations, indictments, and seizures by law enforcement in Kyiv. Top oligarchs are targeted, too, inlcuding Kolomoyskyi and Firtash. Zelensky appears to use the momentum to push against some of the oligarchs and deep state. Details in this thread
https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1620799910223417345
Can we keep adding to our debt? It's a debate that isn't ever had. There are different views.
What is the purpose of schools? At the moment I can think of 4.
1. Childcare. Which enables parents to hold down jobs. Hence outrage about strikes.
2. A form of Sorting Hat to determine who should go to Russell Group. And other Unis like a kind of UEFA Conference League.
3. A way of matching skills with employers to increase efficiency and productivity.
4. To encourage Jungian individuation.
Right now we are trying to do all 4 at once.
Badly.
https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1620894980117270533
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/31/dorset-wiltshire-firefighters-accused-in-itn-news-report-over-images-of-female-crash-victims
Parliament. The Met. Other police forces. The NHS. The Army. The London Fire Brigade.
Now another fire service.
Could these men just learn to behave, for crying out loud. It's not that hard.
And if they can't could they just piss off to some remote part of the world and behave like priapic baboons with each other and leave civilised people in peace. Thanks.
To my mind the purpose of formal education is to fit people with tools to live a fulfilling life as an adult member of civil society which enables them to grow even after formal education is ended.
Personally I would shift the emphasis from subjects like maths, french, english etc to acquistion of abilities instead with the current traditional subjects being additional modules for those that desire them.
For example which fits someone for later life who plans on joining his father as an apprentice plumber, teaching them about book keeping, running a small business and taxation or teaching them history, french and calculus. Most teachers of any specialisation should be able to teach that, other kids wanting aim for sciences you teach a more traditional curriculum in.
I would therefore set the target for primary schools to teach basic maths addition, subtraction etc, reading , critical thought and analysis (basic level), civics, some basic science, some arts and humanities.
He has history rubbing Trump up the wrong way:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-department-accuses-ukrainian-oligarch-of-stealing-billions-from-bank-he-once-owned-and-laundering-it-in-the-us/2020/08/06/b88924b8-d7f4-11ea-aff6-220dd3a14741_story.html
Gotta wonder what proportion of the weapons sold to Ukraine have been reaching where they're supposed to.
"We’re launching a pilot subscription plan for ChatGPT, a conversational AI that can chat with you, answer follow-up questions, and challenge incorrect assumptions"
For those who are 'ChatGPT-curious'
Unfortunately, we get top down directed bollocks insisting that as well as X we teach y z and ABC too.
This requires much more funding.
But loads of the resistance and kicking off comes from a one size fits all National Curriculum.
We survived for decades without one.
If you don't have any language skills you won't be much use exporting and importing from the Continent either. History is vital to understand your culture and global cultures.
Vocational skills and apprenticeships are already available in 6th form anyway
I'm struggling to teach a kid simple addition and reading right now.
But she draws and paints at gallery standard already.
It's obvious at age 12 that's what she'll do for a living.
She's quite exceptional.
But she's firmly convinced she's thick.
This is not a headline I think acceptable, but it reflects the social reality there.
Is non-consensual sex not rape?
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/02/113_344628.html
… In recent years, women's rights groups and civic activists, who claim that the existing rape law is outdated and insufficient to protect the victims, have been strongly demanding the legal definition of rape to be expanded to include non-consensual sex.
But the idea has drawn fierce backlash from some men who believe that a consent-based definition of rape may result in an increase of false rape accusations. They view that whether the sexual activity was consensual or non-consensual will be difficult to confirm in court proceedings.
The thorny issue was spotlighted again recently after the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family retracted a plan to review revisions to the rape law to include non-consensual sex, a few hours after it was announced…
… Rep. Kweon Seong-dong of the ruling People Power Party (PPP) claimed that the proposed revision will only worsen gender conflicts.
"Such a law may result in possible false rape allegations. It will be highly difficult to determine a criminal offense based only on a victim's claim," he wrote on Facebook. The lawmaker also said that state intervention over individuals' sexual activities, which are considered a private matter, should be limited to a minimum level. ..
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dp7r3q/mystery-road-origin-episode-1#
Having some knowledge of your culture is vital to understanding your area and nation, not just for historians
Free the potential, feel the growth
“Gordon Brown was so pissed off that Tony Blair was cavorting around the world and expecting the red carpet treatment, he ordered a directive.”
@JonSopel shares his insider knowledge of the former Labour PMs. [VIDEO]
https://twitter.com/TheNewsAgents/status/1620855878755799040
The yougov today with Labours lead falling and more importantly the Tory % firm was another good poll for the Conservatives in what becoming a heartening sequence of closing the gap for them. In the yougov sequence alone this winter (which is how we should read polls) it was 3 or 4 points lower but has leaped up and stuck to where it is now without dropping back. Yougov is a indisputable example of the Tories now clearly polling 3% higher than they were some months back. This winter, despite everything, they have put on a hefty 3% more voters.
The reason why trends like this in the polling now is important, is this is still midterm and a crisis for the country at least on par with the 70s leading to winter of discontent - there just cannot be a worse economic or political set of narratives to poll a government against, so the progress Tories are making in polls in such stormy weather as this has to cheer them - not to the extent of excited about re-election, but it is suggestive of a polling comeback to salvage 250 seats or more come the election, which would, thanks to 45-55 SNP leave Labour way short.
2) Frankly unless you can posit an answer to this challenge then you are talking bollocks about history. Show me an example when a lack of knowledge of Oliver Cromwell is going to hinder my life....yes I know who Cromwell was and what he did but was amazed my son didnt despite doing a history gcse.
Yes she should know how to do addition, subtraction, percentages, multiplication and division and some basic bookkeeping/ budgetting skills. I doubt very much she will need more than that so why spend hours every week for 6 more years trying to teach her stuff she is so unlikely to need. Better she uses the time learning something actually relevant to the rest of her life
Honestly a lot of men - whether here or abroad - seem to think that women just exist to serve men, as a sort of wallpaper to men's lives and needs. As if we don't exist for real, for ourselves.
It is very very tiresome. A lot of men really need to grow up.
A 1970s British film on obscure cinema channel Talking Pictures in the small hours entitled 'All Coppers are......''
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YahGgwfvKcg
You can't understand much about your town or village or city or indeed our democracy without history, or indeed much of the news from the Middle East to Brexit to Northern Ireland to Remembrance Day
Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
Obviously you can't scale down crudely like that though. NY has pretty tight gun laws, so I would expect a lower figure there. Not sure about LA. Laws are tight, but it's pretty wild in parts.
RCS lives there for a start.
I have worked in plenty of multi national companies with international teams and I can assure you english is the lingua franca of business and you claiming its not speaks more to your ignorance than mine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXK03FHVsHk
You may feel you only need educationally whatever is functional for you in your job working with software - oh and for counting money. Someone who is educated properly as a child goes on learning stuff all their lives, way beyond what they "need" for a job.
You are showing a dismal level of understanding here of what education, mathematics, language, historical knowledge, and cultural interchange are all about, as well as the critical thought that you mentioned, but yeah, I get it, "fuck off", "Russian troll", and see if you care.
* I'm not convinced that 1 will remain around forever.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/30/part/II/enacted
Under Thatcher it went from 33% to 25% over 10 years. From 1979 onwards there was the NI contribution of between 8 and 10% on top of that. So the overall tax and NI take after your allowance was between 35% and 41%. That is for standard rate payers.
Korea's Criminal Law defines the crime of rape as sexual activity against one's will involving "violence or intimidation." As such, in order to secure a rape conviction, prosecutors must prove that the perpetrator had used or threatened violence against the victim. Sexual assault against a victim in a vulnerable state, such as under the influence of alcohol or drugs, is seen as "quasi-rape."…
Social attitudes have changed massively in South Korea in recent decades, but remain quite regressive in terms of women’s rights - something which is also a strong dividing line between liberal and conservative politics.
Note that the change in the law was proposed, and rejected, by the current conservative administration. Korean liberal politicians would have enacted it.
It’s not all that long ago that the UK was every bit as bad, as you will recall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_English_law#History
… In January 1982, the Government accepted an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill the effect of which, if enacted, would be to compel judges to sentence men convicted of rape to imprisonment. This followed a case earlier that month in which John Allen, 33, businessman and convicted of raping a 17-year-old hitchhiker, had been fined £2,000 by Judge Bernard Richard, who alleged the victim's "contributory negligence".