That wasn't true when he was mayor of London, when he reached far beyond the Brexit classes (different role, granted, and one he was much more suited to).
Problem 1 though is that you can't win an election with a marmite leader that only ~25% love;
Problem 2 is that between them, Johnson and Truss did the Tory brand so much damage (and, in Johnson's case, changed the nature of the party too), that attempting to revert to the norm of boring but competent men in grey suits doesn't work either. And Sunak isn't particularly competent either.
Is this some kind of alternate history. If you don't think he is electable then you must think he is unelectable. Is that your position? That BoJo was unelectable?
Next you'll be saying he wasn't loveable.
He was very much unelectable by the time he was ousted, and is even more so now.
He was elected in 2019 because of the very specific circumstances of the election, and of his opponent. A lot of people (including me, FWIW), voted Tory in the end primarily to keep Corbyn out, despite many misgivings about his record and nature.
Me too (not that me too).
But he is electable. I would move it from was to still is. People are fickle. Jeremy Corbyn was nearly our PM ffs. Boris is showbiz, was then is now.
We thought we wanted a boring technocrat after the mad years of the Cons (starting with Brexit) but turns out people want charisma. This is not a post advocating his return to take or keep the Cons in power but just to say that he is electable because people like him.
Not enough people like him and a lot of people hate him and are not going to change their minds. We have copious evidence for this from election results to opinion polls since 2021. It is not 2019 any more, never mind 2012. It's not even 2022 any more. His actions as PM, both personal and policy, have shaped opinion in a way that won't now change.
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
The top rate of income tax reached 50% and the Equality Act came in in the last years of the Brown government too to try and shore up his left wing base
Yes, lets all decry the idea of treating people equally as leftie dog-whistle politics.
No, hang on. The Lord Cameron of PigLove equalised marriage after a LibDem proposal. And he isn't leftie or appealing to a leftie base.
Perhaps normal people are less prejudiced than others...?
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
A number of people liked him enough to marry him
They threw all that away when they divorced him for being a ****
The electorate were wise to do the same
Fun fact. Boris Johnson has been divorced as many times as all other UK prime ministers combined.
So far.
Now, if he had more children than all the other UK PMs combined, then I'd be impressed.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
Fake Designed by bloke from Chingford Designed by bloke from Pretoria Global effort
Lol. I don't think the iPhone would have been created by Ive without Jobs but I do think it would have been created by Jobs without Ive.
But why am I debating with a guy who thinks the moon landings were faked?
Jobs was frequently suspended at school, dropped out of his electronics course, then dropped out of college after one semester. Not sure the PISA raters would have been impressed despite Jobs' achievements towering over theirs.
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
The top rate of income tax reached 50% and the Equality Act came in in the last years of the Brown government too to try and shore up his left wing base
Yes, lets all decry the idea of treating people equally as leftie dog-whistle politics.
No, hang on. The Lord Cameron of PigLove equalised marriage after a LibDem proposal. And he isn't leftie or appealing to a leftie base.
Perhaps normal people are less prejudiced than others...?
It was Labour and LD MPs who passed the Equal Marriage Act, most Conservative MPs voted against it
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
The top rate of income tax reached 50% and the Equality Act came in in the last years of the Brown government too to try and shore up his left wing base
The Equality Act was promised in Labour's 2005 manifesto (when Blair was PM). It was not a panic measure to "shore up" anything.
An interesting piece in the Guardian to gladden the hearts of Brexiters, and I'd guess @Leon would take some pleasure from seeing some of his observations repeated.
Most controversial Guardian opinion piece since claims Thomas the Tank engine is racist, sexist, homophobic they published Osama Bin Laden's Letter to America....
It’s not the most convincing of pieces, thought, is it, and looks like one of those articles written to construct an argument for a pre-judged conclusion. The EU v US economic size disparity is created significantly by Brexit itself; the EU’s “economic woes” hardly rest on not having a globally leading technology sector, and the US itself is hardly without significant political and economic challenges.
The EU’s economic woes are ABSOLUTELY and intimately linked to its inability to produce a tech sector to match that in the USA, China, even Japan and Korea
My visit to inland Sicily a few weeks back was quite mind boggling in this respect. Parts of Europe are regressing to North African levels of poverty and helplessness - and ugliness
Even in the dreariest parts of Britain - and my God they can be dreary - it isn’t quite that bad. This might just be the English language, I dunno
If any tech giant emerges from Europe (unlikely, it would be bought by MetaGoogle first) my bet is it would come from London with the Netherlands as a second possibility, after that….
I’ve been very down on America in recent years, and it does have gigantic problems; but its tech prowess is a huge and crucial advantage
The UK has not much, but it has DeepMind
The EU has….
In Ericsson and Nokia, the EU has two of the five major players in global connectivity infrastructure and software. China has Huawei, Korea has Samsung and the US has Qualcomm. The problem is that while connectivity is absolutely central to everything, including AI, the margins are not great and the Nordics do not have the other income sources that their three rivals do. Connectivity is an enabler, not a disruptive force itself.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
The iPhone - like all smartphones - is heavily dependent on connectivity technology developed in the EU.
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
The top rate of income tax reached 50% and the Equality Act came in in the last years of the Brown government too to try and shore up his left wing base
The Equality Act was promised in Labour's 2005 manifesto (when Blair was PM). It was not a panic measure to "shore up" anything.
It also didn't radically change anything. While rights of equality were extended to some new areas, none was particularly controversial and the Act was mainly one of consolidation and streamlining.
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
The top rate of income tax reached 50% and the Equality Act came in in the last years of the Brown government too to try and shore up his left wing base
The Equality Act was promised in Labour's 2005 manifesto (when Blair was PM). It was not a panic measure to "shore up" anything.
In which case getting immigration under control was part of the 2019 Conservative manifesto too
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
Yes Boris was also the first Tory leader ever to beat Labour with DE unskilled working class and unemployed voters when he won that group in 2019, albeit helped by the get Brexit done message.
Those voters are now back voting Labour and probably won’t vote Tory again, certainly not for Sunak and Hunt. C2 skilled working class voters were also pro Boris
For the record, those voters weren't pro-Johnson, they were anti-Corbyn.
The last YouGov leadership poll before the election gave Johnson a -4 net rating with C2DE but Corbyn a net -49. DeltaPoll had the respective scores at -1 and -39. Ipsos Mori had them at -13 and -45.
Yet DEs voted for Corbyn over May in 2017 and Boris also won C2s in 2019 by more than May did in 2017
Because May (and Nick Timothy) blew the election campaign.
I don't have the figures to hand but it'd be interesting to see the C2/DE split at the *local* elections in May 2017.
Anyway, there's nothing particularly magic about gaining the support of any one group, particularly when Johnson had already lost it again by the time he was ousted.
Boris did have a level of appeal to the working class no Tory leader before him could match however.
Certainly his successors, Truss and Sunak, got nowhere near that appeal with them either
I loathe the man but I think this is true. To go from the awful Con polling position when he took over to the big GE win 5 months later was pretty remarkable. Yes, Brexit and yes, Corbyn, and yes the brilliant Cummings strategy, but some of it was him. "Boris".
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
AI, and then AGI, and then ASI - far more important than any of those mentioned
Whichever country/corporation nails this first will race ahead, and most experts are now predicting this will happen in 3-7 years (ie before 2030)
And America is right at the head of the pack. China is about 2-3 years behind (maybe more,but quantum computing is an opaque area). The EU is almost nowhere. The UK is doing OK, we need to make sure we stay close to the USA, symbiotically linking London with Silicon Valley.
TBF to our dreadful government, this is one thing they do seem to get. Sunak is a tech bro manque, after all. I pray Starmer doesn’t fuck it up
What has Sunak done to encourage UK involvement? How do you measure it?
What can Starmer do to discourage UK involvement? How do you measure it?
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
The top rate of income tax reached 50% and the Equality Act came in in the last years of the Brown government too to try and shore up his left wing base
The Equality Act was promised in Labour's 2005 manifesto (when Blair was PM). It was not a panic measure to "shore up" anything.
In which case getting immigration under control was part of the 2019 Conservative manifesto too
The point being is that importing 500K to 1M people per year is not "under control". There is absolutely no point in boasting about stopping hundreds of illegals arriving in little boats if you are welcoming hundreds of thousands of legals per year in groups of widebody aircraft at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stanstead, Southampton, Liverpool, Belfast, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Cardiff...
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
The top rate of income tax reached 50% and the Equality Act came in in the last years of the Brown government too to try and shore up his left wing base
The Equality Act was promised in Labour's 2005 manifesto (when Blair was PM). It was not a panic measure to "shore up" anything.
In which case getting immigration under control was part of the 2019 Conservative manifesto too
Why set a target of 600,000 overseas students to come each year in 2020 then?
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
The iPhone - like all smartphones - is heavily dependent on connectivity technology developed in the EU.
And actually on other chips, hardware and software as well.
Mrs J - working in Britain - has circuitry/chips of her (well, the teams she was in) design in many common phones. At one stage, in Apple, Samsung (not US, I think) and Google phones. Probably in most of the others as well.
For those who think China is going to take over the world, I will ask: what great, revolutionary and world-changing tech has China developed?
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
The top rate of income tax reached 50% and the Equality Act came in in the last years of the Brown government too to try and shore up his left wing base
The Equality Act was promised in Labour's 2005 manifesto (when Blair was PM). It was not a panic measure to "shore up" anything.
In which case getting immigration under control was part of the 2019 Conservative manifesto too
And 2010 "...we will take steps to take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands"
And 2015 'We will: keep our ambition of delivering annual net migration in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands"
And 2017 "It is our objective to reduce immigration to sustainable levels, by which we mean annual net migration in the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands we have seen over the last two decades."
That wasn't true when he was mayor of London, when he reached far beyond the Brexit classes (different role, granted, and one he was much more suited to).
Problem 1 though is that you can't win an election with a marmite leader that only ~25% love;
Problem 2 is that between them, Johnson and Truss did the Tory brand so much damage (and, in Johnson's case, changed the nature of the party too), that attempting to revert to the norm of boring but competent men in grey suits doesn't work either. And Sunak isn't particularly competent either.
Is this some kind of alternate history. If you don't think he is electable then you must think he is unelectable. Is that your position? That BoJo was unelectable?
Next you'll be saying he wasn't loveable.
What Boris is blooming good at is seduction.
What he's very bad at is maintaining a relationship, see the Max Hastings line about everyone who deals with him regrets it in the end. It's just a matter of time.
Hence the Metro Elite / Salt of the Earth split. Not because one or other is a better judge of character, just that more ME types have had previous dealings with BoJo, or a BoJoalike. Previous infection confers immunity. And that's now spreading, as our Red Wall correspondents report.
Maybe there was a window where Prince Hal could have become King Henry. Spring 2020, massive majority, national crisis. He had the chance to be the national hero he so clearly wanted to be.
He didn't take it. Whether that's because he couldn't or just didn't want to, barely matters.
A lot of people have said about Boris Johnson that he needs capable people around him to do the proper work, and, presumably, to mind him. I've used the example of his cycling commissioner in London before, Andrew Gilligan, who did more for cycling than anyone else in Britain.
As PM Boris Johnson ended up with Dominic "Barnard Castle Eye Test" Cummings, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Priti Patel and Matt Hancock. His choice of people to surround himself with was poor (though with one crucial vaccine-related exception). He appears to have had no-one of ability to manage things, or anyone with principle to keep him in line.
But Cummings did help him pull off a massive general election win. So there is that.
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
The top rate of income tax reached 50% and the Equality Act came in in the last years of the Brown government too to try and shore up his left wing base
The Equality Act was promised in Labour's 2005 manifesto (when Blair was PM). It was not a panic measure to "shore up" anything.
In which case getting immigration under control was part of the 2019 Conservative manifesto too
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
The top rate of income tax reached 50% and the Equality Act came in in the last years of the Brown government too to try and shore up his left wing base
The Equality Act was promised in Labour's 2005 manifesto (when Blair was PM). It was not a panic measure to "shore up" anything.
In which case getting immigration under control was part of the 2019 Conservative manifesto too
And 2010 "...we will take steps to take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands"
And 2015 'We will: keep our ambition of delivering annual net migration in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands"
And 2017 "It is our objective to reduce immigration to sustainable levels, by which we mean annual net migration in the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands we have seen over the last two decades."
Same old Tories, same old bullshit.
And with the £38k minimum salary for a visa requirement and the ban on migrants bringing in dependents they might finally start to make progress on delivering it
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
The iPhone - like all smartphones - is heavily dependent on connectivity technology developed in the EU.
The innovation with the iPhone was bringing it all together into one package.
“Let's see... on one side of the fight is horny teen boys with a lot of time at their hands who are internet-natives and who can score big respect points from their peers if they can get them access to the forbidden pages. In league with them is the providers of that content who are very keen to offer these horny teens that content if they somehow get away with it.
“Up against them is a group of overprotective busybodies without any real problems so they meddle in stuff they don't know f**k all about, especially that dreaded internets thingamajig, they don't get it, they don't want it, their kids are glued to it and they don't like it, so it should go away, and that's pretty much all they know about it. They get support from an apathetic government that will pay any and all lip service to their "deep concerns" in the vain hope that this could convince the busybodies to vote for them again, but frankly, they couldn't give a toss about whether their regulations have any effect. If anything, it could hurt the economy of those porn businesses, so ... let's not go overboard with that, shall we?
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
The iPhone - like all smartphones - is heavily dependent on connectivity technology developed in the EU.
The innovation with the iPhone was bringing it all together into one package.
Absolutely. As in so many areas, it's the implementation of foundational technology that turns out to be far more lucrative than the original work. This is where Europe - including the UK - so often fails: getting inventions out of labs and universities into products. The issue, I think, is financing and business culture, rather than a lack of innovative ability.
As PM Boris Johnson ended up with Dominic "Barnard Castle Eye Test" Cummings, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Priti Patel and Matt Hancock. His choice of people to surround himself with was poor (though with one crucial vaccine-related exception). He appears to have had no-one of ability to manage things, or anyone with principle to keep him in line.
The common thread running through that whole team is Brexit
no-one of ability to manage things, or anyone with principle was prepared to go along with his Brexit bollocks
While I have some sympathy with junior doctors and it is unquestionable that the salary has degraded over the last 15-20 years, they are not alone in that. University academics have seen a similar relative decline. And yet I am better off than I was 15 years ago because of promotion/career development. And this will be the same for the medics.
At some point this country needs to realise that we are living beyond our means and understand what jobs are worth.
I also take issue with the way that junior doctors insist on using hourly rates of pay to campaign, as this is misleading where there is overtime and other ways that the basic salary is topped up. My Uni salary is not topped up by overtime.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
Fake Designed by bloke from Chingford Designed by bloke from Pretoria Global effort
The British Empire lives on, perhaps.
SpaceX happened for various reasons.
One critical moment was when Elon Musk bumped into a professional rocket engine designer. They were both at an amateur rocket engine convention. The professional rocket engineer was so hacked off with work being slow that he’d built an 8 ton thrust rocket engine in his garage and was trying to find a test stand….
So what was critical was having a mass of mad amateurs and professionals mixing it up at the level of building serious hardware. A whole eco system of rocket engineers in solution. Pissed off with the existing, slow way of doing things. Waiting for the seed to cause crystalisation
It’s like Silicon Valley - you need
1) mad money chasing dreams 2) techies with dreams 3) the infrastructure - not just other start ups, but all the ancillary stuff.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
The iPhone - like all smartphones - is heavily dependent on connectivity technology developed in the EU.
And actually on other chips, hardware and software as well.
Mrs J - working in Britain - has circuitry/chips of her (well, the teams she was in) design...
I initially thought you meant Mrs J has circuitry/chips, which threw me for a bit. When were they installed in her, and does she know?
(perhaps "has circuitry/chips of her design (well, the teams she was in)" would have worked better than "has circuitry/chips of her (well, the teams she was in) design" )
Face eating leopards party going well (Telegraph columnist discovers that increasing the earning level needed to bring a spouse into the country affects his mate)
If a British person falls in love with someone from abroad and they want to get married and live together here I really don't think the government should be standing in their way. Whatever happened to family values?
While I have some sympathy with junior doctors and it is unquestionable that the salary has degraded over the last 15-20 years, they are not alone in that. University academics have seen a similar relative decline. And yet I am better off than I was 15 years ago because of promotion/career development. And this will be the same for the medics.
At some point this country needs to realise that we are living beyond our means and understand what jobs are worth.
I also take issue with the way that junior doctors insist on using hourly rates of pay to campaign, as this is misleading where there is overtime and other ways that the basic salary is topped up. My Uni salary is not topped up by overtime.
Yes you are right but none of that matters since it is abundantly clear that their salary is not enough to prevent staff leaving. It's just market economics, and whether they *deserve* it is a red herring.
While I have some sympathy with junior doctors and it is unquestionable that the salary has degraded over the last 15-20 years, they are not alone in that. University academics have seen a similar relative decline. And yet I am better off than I was 15 years ago because of promotion/career development. And this will be the same for the medics.
At some point this country needs to realise that we are living beyond our means and understand what jobs are worth.
I also take issue with the way that junior doctors insist on using hourly rates of pay to campaign, as this is misleading where there is overtime and other ways that the basic salary is topped up. My Uni salary is not topped up by overtime.
Yes you are right but none of that matters since it is abundantly clear that their salary is not enough to prevent staff leaving. It's just market economics, and whether they *deserve* it is a red herring.
A fair point, although wait until the increase in training kicks in. Pharmacy underwent a huge increase in Uni places around 20 years ago, and that led to many more pharmacists, and ultimately reduced the salary that could be commanded (e.g. by locums). Medicine has had a restricted supply of new medics forever, partly because its long, complicated and expensive to train new medics, but also because the existing medics have kept its restricted too. Its in your interests to make sure that they are not enough of your competitors.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
The iPhone - like all smartphones - is heavily dependent on connectivity technology developed in the EU.
And actually on other chips, hardware and software as well.
Mrs J - working in Britain - has circuitry/chips of her (well, the teams she was in) design...
I initially thought you meant Mrs J has circuitry/chips, which threw me for a bit. When were they installed in her, and does she know?
(perhaps "has circuitry/chips of her design (well, the teams she was in)" would have worked better than "has circuitry/chips of her (well, the teams she was in) design" )
Ahem. Yes. Although anyone who knows her might say that your first interpretation is accurate...
Chip designers are weird. Analogue chip designers and really weird...
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
Fake Designed by bloke from Chingford Designed by bloke from Pretoria Global effort
The British Empire lives on, perhaps.
SpaceX happened for various reasons.
One critical moment was when Elon Musk bumped into a professional rocket engine designer. They were both at an amateur rocket engine convention. The professional rocket engineer was so hacked off with work being slow that he’d built an 8 ton thrust rocket engine in his garage and was trying to find a test stand….
So what was critical was having a mass of mad amateurs and professionals mixing it up at the level of building serious hardware. A whole eco system of rocket engineers in solution. Pissed off with the existing, slow way of doing things. Waiting for the seed to cause crystalisation
It’s like Silicon Valley - you need
1) mad money chasing dreams 2) techies with dreams 3) the infrastructure - not just other start ups, but all the ancillary stuff.
Also, a willingness to fail, and a system that ensures that failure does not mean you can never attempt anything again.
It should also be remembered that SpaceX was tried before, and failed. The federal government had a lot to do with its success; and that had a great deal to do with the likes of the late Jerry Pournelle.
While I have some sympathy with junior doctors and it is unquestionable that the salary has degraded over the last 15-20 years, they are not alone in that. University academics have seen a similar relative decline. And yet I am better off than I was 15 years ago because of promotion/career development. And this will be the same for the medics.
At some point this country needs to realise that we are living beyond our means and understand what jobs are worth.
I also take issue with the way that junior doctors insist on using hourly rates of pay to campaign, as this is misleading where there is overtime and other ways that the basic salary is topped up. My Uni salary is not topped up by overtime.
Jobs arent worth "something", see the pay of care workers vs elite footballers, they are set by supply and demand. At current salaries supply of doctors is not met. Of course we could train more but that requires investment and patience which we (i.e. the govt) are not prepared to do either.
The government really need to find a deal with junior doctors .
The length of the industrial action is going to lead to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments. Sunak can keep wanking on about immigration but the failure to tackle NHS waiting lists is going to be terminal for the Tories .
When Labour left office there were 2 million on waiting lists . Likely the Tories will have 7 million .
That will be on every election leaflet .
The government is thrashing about in its death throes. It’s only doing to do “radical” right wing policy that appeals to its ERG/ new conservative rump
The top rate of income tax reached 50% and the Equality Act came in in the last years of the Brown government too to try and shore up his left wing base
The Equality Act was promised in Labour's 2005 manifesto (when Blair was PM). It was not a panic measure to "shore up" anything.
In which case getting immigration under control was part of the 2019 Conservative manifesto too
And 2010 "...we will take steps to take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands"
And 2015 'We will: keep our ambition of delivering annual net migration in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands"
And 2017 "It is our objective to reduce immigration to sustainable levels, by which we mean annual net migration in the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands we have seen over the last two decades."
While I have some sympathy with junior doctors and it is unquestionable that the salary has degraded over the last 15-20 years, they are not alone in that. University academics have seen a similar relative decline. And yet I am better off than I was 15 years ago because of promotion/career development. And this will be the same for the medics.
At some point this country needs to realise that we are living beyond our means and understand what jobs are worth.
I also take issue with the way that junior doctors insist on using hourly rates of pay to campaign, as this is misleading where there is overtime and other ways that the basic salary is topped up. My Uni salary is not topped up by overtime.
Jobs arent worth "something", see the pay of care workers vs elite footballers, they are set by supply and demand. At current salaries supply of doctors is not met. Of course we could train more but that requires investment and patience which we (i.e. the govt) are not prepared to do either.
The last bit is wrong - training places have increased for medicine. This will have impacts down the line. Without going all @HYUFD you can now study medicine without the luxury of getting 3A* or whatever at A level.
I do agree about supply and demand but ultimately the NHS can only pay what it can afford. If medics want to take their labour elsewhere that's their choice.
The analogy with elite footballers is interesting. I believe that the top tier footballers have the ability to do things that the other 99.99999% of the human race cannot, and that is what they get paid for. The same is arguably not true of bankers.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
Fake Designed by bloke from Chingford Designed by bloke from Pretoria Global effort
The British Empire lives on, perhaps.
SpaceX happened for various reasons.
One critical moment was when Elon Musk bumped into a professional rocket engine designer. They were both at an amateur rocket engine convention. The professional rocket engineer was so hacked off with work being slow that he’d built an 8 ton thrust rocket engine in his garage and was trying to find a test stand….
So what was critical was having a mass of mad amateurs and professionals mixing it up at the level of building serious hardware. A whole eco system of rocket engineers in solution. Pissed off with the existing, slow way of doing things. Waiting for the seed to cause crystalisation
It’s like Silicon Valley - you need
1) mad money chasing dreams 2) techies with dreams 3) the infrastructure - not just other start ups, but all the ancillary stuff.
Also, a willingness to fail, and a system that ensures that failure does not mean you can never attempt anything again.
It should also be remembered that SpaceX was tried before, and failed. The federal government had a lot to do with its success; and that had a great deal to do with the likes of the late Jerry Pournelle.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
"The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation)"
What the Actual F**k?
There was a *massive* amount of innovation involved in the Moon landings. The vast amount of money thrown at the project accelerated many things that had Earthside applications - including ICs.
The USA succeeded in the Moon landings exactly because it could innovate.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
Fake Designed by bloke from Chingford Designed by bloke from Pretoria Global effort
The British Empire lives on, perhaps.
SpaceX happened for various reasons.
One critical moment was when Elon Musk bumped into a professional rocket engine designer. They were both at an amateur rocket engine convention. The professional rocket engineer was so hacked off with work being slow that he’d built an 8 ton thrust rocket engine in his garage and was trying to find a test stand….
So what was critical was having a mass of mad amateurs and professionals mixing it up at the level of building serious hardware. A whole eco system of rocket engineers in solution. Pissed off with the existing, slow way of doing things. Waiting for the seed to cause crystalisation
It’s like Silicon Valley - you need
1) mad money chasing dreams 2) techies with dreams 3) the infrastructure - not just other start ups, but all the ancillary stuff.
Also, a willingness to fail, and a system that ensures that failure does not mean you can never attempt anything again.
It should also be remembered that SpaceX was tried before, and failed. The federal government had a lot to do with its success; and that had a great deal to do with the likes of the late Jerry Pournelle.
While I have some sympathy with junior doctors and it is unquestionable that the salary has degraded over the last 15-20 years, they are not alone in that. University academics have seen a similar relative decline. And yet I am better off than I was 15 years ago because of promotion/career development. And this will be the same for the medics.
At some point this country needs to realise that we are living beyond our means and understand what jobs are worth.
I also take issue with the way that junior doctors insist on using hourly rates of pay to campaign, as this is misleading where there is overtime and other ways that the basic salary is topped up. My Uni salary is not topped up by overtime.
Jobs arent worth "something", see the pay of care workers vs elite footballers, they are set by supply and demand. At current salaries supply of doctors is not met. Of course we could train more but that requires investment and patience which we (i.e. the govt) are not prepared to do either.
We are training more. But we are not training enough to meet even the lowest projections of medical staff for the NHS.
Given what we know of the educational system of the U.K. we could probably triple medical staff training and not exhaust the wasted potential out there. And if there aren’t enough medical jobs for triple the number of medics - well, they will have a STEM degree and the basis of a skill that is in very short supply around the world.
While I have some sympathy with junior doctors and it is unquestionable that the salary has degraded over the last 15-20 years, they are not alone in that. University academics have seen a similar relative decline. And yet I am better off than I was 15 years ago because of promotion/career development. And this will be the same for the medics.
At some point this country needs to realise that we are living beyond our means and understand what jobs are worth.
I also take issue with the way that junior doctors insist on using hourly rates of pay to campaign, as this is misleading where there is overtime and other ways that the basic salary is topped up. My Uni salary is not topped up by overtime.
Jobs arent worth "something", see the pay of care workers vs elite footballers, they are set by supply and demand. At current salaries supply of doctors is not met. Of course we could train more but that requires investment and patience which we (i.e. the govt) are not prepared to do either.
The last bit is wrong - training places have increased for medicine. This will have impacts down the line. Without going all @HYUFD you can now study medicine without the luxury of getting 3A* or whatever at A level.
I do agree about supply and demand but ultimately the NHS can only pay what it can afford. If medics want to take their labour elsewhere that's their choice.
The analogy with elite footballers is interesting. I believe that the top tier footballers have the ability to do things that the other 99.99999% of the human race cannot, and that is what they get paid for. The same is arguably not true of bankers.
Training more doctors is one of the things Tory politicians love to claim. It is touching that there are still a few that believe the things they say. Actions speak louder than words.
As for what we can afford, I know a doctor offered £2,500 for a single shift. If they weren't striking and leaving in droves that shift wouldn't have been needed.
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
Fake Designed by bloke from Chingford Designed by bloke from Pretoria Global effort
The British Empire lives on, perhaps.
SpaceX happened for various reasons.
One critical moment was when Elon Musk bumped into a professional rocket engine designer. They were both at an amateur rocket engine convention. The professional rocket engineer was so hacked off with work being slow that he’d built an 8 ton thrust rocket engine in his garage and was trying to find a test stand….
So what was critical was having a mass of mad amateurs and professionals mixing it up at the level of building serious hardware. A whole eco system of rocket engineers in solution. Pissed off with the existing, slow way of doing things. Waiting for the seed to cause crystalisation
It’s like Silicon Valley - you need
1) mad money chasing dreams 2) techies with dreams 3) the infrastructure - not just other start ups, but all the ancillary stuff.
Plus, very often:
4) A ready supply of government subsidies, usually in the form of guaranteed orders, but could be other things - Tesla harvested EV regulatory credits from other car manufacturers for instance. SpaceX received crucial US government orders.
Not that this is bad - quite the reverse: government support can drive innovation. But it’s much harder to get off the ground without it, especially if you’re making physical hardware rather than software.
While I have some sympathy with junior doctors and it is unquestionable that the salary has degraded over the last 15-20 years, they are not alone in that. University academics have seen a similar relative decline. And yet I am better off than I was 15 years ago because of promotion/career development. And this will be the same for the medics.
At some point this country needs to realise that we are living beyond our means and understand what jobs are worth.
I also take issue with the way that junior doctors insist on using hourly rates of pay to campaign, as this is misleading where there is overtime and other ways that the basic salary is topped up. My Uni salary is not topped up by overtime.
Jobs arent worth "something", see the pay of care workers vs elite footballers, they are set by supply and demand. At current salaries supply of doctors is not met. Of course we could train more but that requires investment and patience which we (i.e. the govt) are not prepared to do either.
The last bit is wrong - training places have increased for medicine. This will have impacts down the line. Without going all @HYUFD you can now study medicine without the luxury of getting 3A* or whatever at A level.
I do agree about supply and demand but ultimately the NHS can only pay what it can afford. If medics want to take their labour elsewhere that's their choice.
The analogy with elite footballers is interesting. I believe that the top tier footballers have the ability to do things that the other 99.99999% of the human race cannot, and that is what they get paid for. The same is arguably not true of bankers.
Training more doctors is one of the things Tory politicians love to claim. It is touching that there are still a few that believe the things they say. Actions speak louder than words.
As for what we can afford, I know a doctor offered £2,500 for a single shift. If they weren't striking and leaving in droves that shift wouldn't have been needed.
Existing NHS doctors taking £2,500 locum shifts, is like a reverse strike - holding the public service to ransom, in order to line their own pockets.
The European Commission is set to recommend delaying tariffs on electric cars traded with the UK by three years, according to people familiar with the matter.
Under current post-Brexit arrangements to be phased in from Jan. 1, EVs moving between the UK and the European Union would attract a 10% duty if less than 45% of their value comes from the region.
The European Commission is set to recommend delaying tariffs on electric cars traded with the UK by three years, according to people familiar with the matter.
Under current post-Brexit arrangements to be phased in from Jan. 1, EVs moving between the UK and the European Union would attract a 10% duty if less than 45% of their value comes from the region.
The much bigger issue is: Under current post-Brexit arrangements to be phased in from Jan. 1, EVs moving between the the European Union and the UK would attract a 10% duty if less than 45% of their value comes from the region.
The point about Boris is that he was super Marmite
Those who hated him, hated him. But he had a loyal personal vote that REALLY liked him and would come out to vote for him, which they won’t do for any other Tory
It was possibly 20-25% of the electorate, often in lower social classes
The Tories threw all that away when they dumped bojo
A number of people liked him enough to marry him
They threw all that away when they divorced him for being a ****
It is quite interesting to see what is happening to Germany and what it is doing to the country's psyche. Poor Pisa results, unpunctual trains and post, budget chaos, struggling companies, authorities. From front runner to mediocrity. The country is facing an identity crisis.
I live in Germany, a country that has always been selling the tradeoff "You will suffer with the amount or rules, inflexibility, and stubbornness but in exchange you'll get top-notch services, engineering and quality", and which is now more and more just left with the "bad parts"
PISA performance was never great in Germany though. Plus the USA are still strongest in innovation globally in many respects, with poor PISA results as well. Europe should not create self-fulfilling prophecies based on "failed state" narratives (USA is already doing this)
I suspect academics lean too heavily on PISA results.
The contention that "the USA are still strongest in innovation globally" seems accurate to me. But have we passed peak US innovation? If so can we pinpoint the peak?
- The moon landings? (Nah, industrial grunt more than innovation) - The iPhone? - SpaceX? - AI? (but maybe China's ahead there?)
The iPhone - like all smartphones - is heavily dependent on connectivity technology developed in the EU.
The innovation with the iPhone was bringing it all together into one package.
Absolutely. As in so many areas, it's the implementation of foundational technology that turns out to be far more lucrative than the original work. This is where Europe - including the UK - so often fails: getting inventions out of labs and universities into products. The issue, I think, is financing and business culture, rather than a lack of innovative ability.
Psion is the case study for this and terrible management. The UK has a huge skills gap at the top, managers are poor and have no vision other than how big their bonus will be.
The European Commission is set to recommend delaying tariffs on electric cars traded with the UK by three years, according to people familiar with the matter.
Under current post-Brexit arrangements to be phased in from Jan. 1, EVs moving between the UK and the European Union would attract a 10% duty if less than 45% of their value comes from the region.
The much bigger issue is: Under current post-Brexit arrangements to be phased in from Jan. 1, EVs moving between the the European Union and the UK would attract a 10% duty if less than 45% of their value comes from the region.
Comments
No, hang on. The Lord Cameron of PigLove equalised marriage after a LibDem proposal. And he isn't leftie or appealing to a leftie base.
Perhaps normal people are less prejudiced than others...?
He isn't Boris
Some people voted for the act
They got the real person instead, and he's a ****
Mrs J - working in Britain - has circuitry/chips of her (well, the teams she was in) design in many common phones. At one stage, in Apple, Samsung (not US, I think) and Google phones. Probably in most of the others as well.
For those who think China is going to take over the world, I will ask: what great, revolutionary and world-changing tech has China developed?
And 2015 'We will: keep our ambition of delivering annual net migration in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands"
And 2017 "It is our objective to reduce immigration to sustainable levels, by which we mean annual net migration in the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands we have seen over the last two decades."
Same old Tories, same old bullshit.
As PM Boris Johnson ended up with Dominic "Barnard Castle Eye Test" Cummings, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Priti Patel and Matt Hancock. His choice of people to surround himself with was poor (though with one crucial vaccine-related exception). He appears to have had no-one of ability to manage things, or anyone with principle to keep him in line.
But Cummings did help him pull off a massive general election win. So there is that.
“The busybodies will, of course, be trying to access the same, forbidden content. And will come up with more are more stupid excuses when caught.”
no-one of ability to manage things, or anyone with principle was prepared to go along with his Brexit bollocks
At some point this country needs to realise that we are living beyond our means and understand what jobs are worth.
I also take issue with the way that junior doctors insist on using hourly rates of pay to campaign, as this is misleading where there is overtime and other ways that the basic salary is topped up. My Uni salary is not topped up by overtime.
One critical moment was when Elon Musk bumped into a professional rocket engine designer. They were both at an amateur rocket engine convention. The professional rocket engineer was so hacked off with work being slow that he’d built an 8 ton thrust rocket engine in his garage and was trying to find a test stand….
So what was critical was having a mass of mad amateurs and professionals mixing it up at the level of building serious hardware. A whole eco system of rocket engineers in solution. Pissed off with the existing, slow way of doing things. Waiting for the seed to cause crystalisation
It’s like Silicon Valley - you need
1) mad money chasing dreams
2) techies with dreams
3) the infrastructure - not just other start ups, but all the ancillary stuff.
(perhaps "has circuitry/chips of her design (well, the teams she was in)" would have worked better than "has circuitry/chips of her (well, the teams she was in) design"
Chip designers are weird. Analogue chip designers and really weird...
It should also be remembered that SpaceX was tried before, and failed. The federal government had a lot to do with its success; and that had a great deal to do with the likes of the late Jerry Pournelle.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conestoga_(rocket)
I do agree about supply and demand but ultimately the NHS can only pay what it can afford. If medics want to take their labour elsewhere that's their choice.
The analogy with elite footballers is interesting. I believe that the top tier footballers have the ability to do things that the other 99.99999% of the human race cannot, and that is what they get paid for. The same is arguably not true of bankers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X , see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMxcrTFO4Lc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_Rocket , see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBL_UJyN88Y
What the Actual F**k?
There was a *massive* amount of innovation involved in the Moon landings. The vast amount of money thrown at the project accelerated many things that had Earthside applications - including ICs.
The USA succeeded in the Moon landings exactly because it could innovate.
Rotary Rocket was just weird.
And in Germany, there was this lively design:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRAG
Given what we know of the educational system of the U.K. we could probably triple medical staff training and not exhaust the wasted potential out there. And if there aren’t enough medical jobs for triple the number of medics - well, they will have a STEM degree and the basis of a skill that is in very short supply around the world.
As for what we can afford, I know a doctor offered £2,500 for a single shift. If they weren't striking and leaving in droves that shift wouldn't have been needed.
4) A ready supply of government subsidies, usually in the form of guaranteed orders, but could be other things - Tesla harvested EV regulatory credits from other car manufacturers for instance. SpaceX received crucial US government orders.
Not that this is bad - quite the reverse: government support can drive innovation. But it’s much harder to get off the ground without it, especially if you’re making physical hardware rather than software.
Under current post-Brexit arrangements to be phased in from Jan. 1, EVs moving between the UK and the European Union would attract a 10% duty if less than 45% of their value comes from the region.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-05/eu-set-to-propose-three-year-delay-to-tariffs-on-uk-ev-trade
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Under current post-Brexit arrangements to be phased in from Jan. 1, EVs moving between the the European Union and the UK would attract a 10% duty if less than 45% of their value comes from the region.