University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
My son is applying for politics at university and has selected Bath, Warwick, York, Sheffield and Durham.
Which would you recommend if not York?
Aberystwyth.
Yes, I am serious. It's a better department than any of those. Just not Russell Group (but then nor is Bath).
Unfortunately those are the univeristies he selected on this UCAS form.
Thats no problem. He could always try being obnoxious at interview and thus fail to get any offers. He can also withdraw and then go back into clearing. There are routes, but take professional advice...
Well we will be going around the university offer days to try and help the decision making process.
I interview dozens of UCAS applicants each year. My favourite was one who when asked why they wanted to study pharmacy, said "I don't". I laughed and pressed on, but returned two more times to that question with the same response. On digging deeper it turned out the kid wanted to study English but her parents were set on her studying and becoming a pharmacist (to take over the business). Her plan was clearly to get reject five times (I obliged), each time being 'baffled' as to why, then go somewhere for English through clearing. I have no idea how it ended, but it was funny... (But also a little sad - parents should really let their kids make their own way through life).
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Barnes Wallis was an SE14 man, he attended my son's school (it was a grammar then) and there's a blue plaque for him locally. Also a vegetarian! According to Wiki he and his wife adopted her sister's children after their parents were killed in an air raid, which given his role in perhaps the most famous British air raid of WW2 has a certain piquancy.
I think there are a few more.
Sir Frank Whittle, perhaps?
An interesting point is how few are post war. The only recent well-known-ish projects I can think of that have had some attention (excluding military who are kept quiet) would perhaps be Thrust-II, Hotol and their successors.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Possibly also Burt Rutan or R. J. Mitchell.
How soon we all forget Frank Whittle...which I suppose proves the point.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Those Mickey Mouse or similar art subjects are the ones that have subsidized STEM costs ever since this system was implemented
Another symptom of declining Britain. Let's have a consultation on the best way to provide a worse public service, in this case Royal Mail.
Since the only things I get through the post seem to be junk mail, tax bills and traffic fines I'd be happy if they stopped delivering altogether.
Kind of why RM is in a bit of a death spiral having failed to invest properly since privatisation - with the money going out as dividends that should have been invested in making it competitive with the non-Amazon delivery firms.
If you can't provide a regular and reliable service, people and firms stop using you for anything useful that needs to reach someone urgently or promptly. So your revenue decreases and you provide a worse service. Three or five days a week would just worsen that problem.
Another legacy of the many failures of the Tory Party over the past 14 years.
But prior to privatisation, Gordon Brown was using RM as a cash cow, also depriving it of investment.
A fine example of the first rule of PB: if any subject is discussed for suffient time it will eventually be blamed on Gordon Brown.
Gordwin's Law
Gordon Brown wasn't responsible for the crash of R100.
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
But where does the hatred come from? Is it part of the American psyche to distrust government? Does it reflect a very large country, so the political “centre” always feels remote? Or is right-wing media constantly lying, scapegoating ‘Washington’ for the ills of deindustrialisation and the actions of big business?
What did all that disaffection get people in Trump’s first term? A ballooning deficit, tax cuts for the rich and a Supreme Court in hock to plutocrats.
The funny thing is that Washington DC (the place rather than the concept) is actually a nice place and almost certainly a much nicer place than the places where the people telling you not to go to Washington live. Especially the bits that anyone actually visiting Washington would go to.
I remember Andrew Sullivan (who lives there) describing how awful the climate is in winter and summer.
Before the creation of air conditioning and in its original configuration of marshy(?) ground, it was considered as a hardship posting by foreign ambassadors posted there.
The knives actually used in most attacks on people are kitchen knives of moderate length.
I don't believe anyone is unaware of that unpleasant factoid, and I understand you and Isam pulling Starmer up on his every idiocy, but even a stopped clock is correct twice a day.
Do we really want combat knives on the streets? If one life is saved, surely Starmer's hand-wringing was worth it.
Well I never, my first two troll flags within ten minutes of each other. Well, well well. Perhaps I should have stfu about responding to Isam commenting on knife crime.
Mid-Term that's not great but not terrible for the Greens and FDP. I't exactly the same for the FDP in the 2013 election and a bit better for the Greens in that election. Admitteldy the greens have been quit a bit higher between 2015 and 2021.
But it is absolutely terribe for the SPD. I would be surprised if the SPD has ever* been lower than 15% for a Bundestag poll. Historically 25% has been considered very bad.
Obviously taking "ever" to mean since 1949 and not including the end of 2023 as that counts as now.
Another symptom of declining Britain. Let's have a consultation on the best way to provide a worse public service, in this case Royal Mail.
Since the only things I get through the post seem to be junk mail, tax bills and traffic fines I'd be happy if they stopped delivering altogether.
Kind of why RM is in a bit of a death spiral having failed to invest properly since privatisation - with the money going out as dividends that should have been invested in making it competitive with the non-Amazon delivery firms.
If you can't provide a regular and reliable service, people and firms stop using you for anything useful that needs to reach someone urgently or promptly. So your revenue decreases and you provide a worse service. Three or five days a week would just worsen that problem.
Another legacy of the many failures of the Tory Party over the past 14 years.
But prior to privatisation, Gordon Brown was using RM as a cash cow, also depriving it of investment.
A fine example of the first rule of PB: if any subject is discussed for suffient time it will eventually be blamed on Gordon Brown.
Gordwin's Law
Gordon Brown wasn't responsible for the crash of R100.
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
But where does the hatred come from? Is it part of the American psyche to distrust government? Does it reflect a very large country, so the political “centre” always feels remote? Or is right-wing media constantly lying, scapegoating ‘Washington’ for the ills of deindustrialisation and the actions of big business?
What did all that disaffection get people in Trump’s first term? A ballooning deficit, tax cuts for the rich and a Supreme Court in hock to plutocrats.
The funny thing is that Washington DC (the place rather than the concept) is actually a nice place and almost certainly a much nicer place than the places where the people telling you not to go to Washington live. Especially the bits that anyone actually visiting Washington would go to.
And of course, I went there anyway, and you are right. The area north of the centre, with its period houses, on street parking, and tree-lined streets, wasn't unlike a London street.
Funnily enough, on the ship home I met someone who worked in government at Washington (some kind of middle to senior official, I think) and I happened to mention that everywhere I went, ordinary Americans had seemed very hostile towards Washington - and, to my surprise, she completely lost it, started shouting at me things like "where do these people think their services come from?" and "who is it that keeps them safe?" and there was no more discussion to be had - I just had to flee at the first opportunity. She seemed at least as angry as the most agitated of those who'd told me not to go there!
Forget knives. First this shows Starmer's instinct as a lawyer is to reach for a new law. Second, in writing anything at all for The Sun, he is cuddling up to Uncle Rupert. Don't assume The Sun will back the Conservatives at the general election.
I suspect the Sun will be neutral in rUK, support SLab in Scotland. Lots of fudge so they can pretend whatever they like in hindsight.
Another symptom of declining Britain. Let's have a consultation on the best way to provide a worse public service, in this case Royal Mail.
Since the only things I get through the post seem to be junk mail, tax bills and traffic fines I'd be happy if they stopped delivering altogether.
Kind of why RM is in a bit of a death spiral having failed to invest properly since privatisation - with the money going out as dividends that should have been invested in making it competitive with the non-Amazon delivery firms.
If you can't provide a regular and reliable service, people and firms stop using you for anything useful that needs to reach someone urgently or promptly. So your revenue decreases and you provide a worse service. Three or five days a week would just worsen that problem.
Another legacy of the many failures of the Tory Party over the past 14 years.
But prior to privatisation, Gordon Brown was using RM as a cash cow, also depriving it of investment.
A fine example of the first rule of PB: if any subject is discussed for suffient time it will eventually be blamed on Gordon Brown.
Gordwin's Law
Gordon Brown wasn't responsible for the crash of R100.
If only because R100 never crashed.
R101, now...
It's Hudson. He's Hicks.
It's obvious that Gordon was responsible for R101 crashing. It was a government project, built with a weird hybrid financing model.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Barnes Wallis was an SE14 man, he attended my son's school (it was a grammar then) and there's a blue plaque for him locally. Also a vegetarian! According to Wiki he and his wife adopted her sister's children after their parents were killed in an air raid, which given his role in perhaps the most famous British air raid of WW2 has a certain piquancy.
I think there are a few more.
Sir Frank Whittle, perhaps?
An interesting point is how few are post war. The only recent well-known-ish projects I can think of that have had some attention (excluding military who are kept quiet) would perhaps be Thrust-II, Hotol and their successors.
Gwynne Shotwell And Elon Musk at SpaceX.
It’s a weird field, as not very many people become famous outside of the field.
We could also add Ross Brawn, James Allison, and a few more of the F1 boys and girls who studied aeronautics.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Possibly also Burt Rutan or R. J. Mitchell.
The wartime ones are probably well known, Sydney Camm, de Haviland, RJ Mitchell you've mentioned. Quite likely we could name the German ones too!
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
But where does the hatred come from? Is it part of the American psyche to distrust government? Does it reflect a very large country, so the political “centre” always feels remote? Or is right-wing media constantly lying, scapegoating ‘Washington’ for the ills of deindustrialisation and the actions of big business?
What did all that disaffection get people in Trump’s first term? A ballooning deficit, tax cuts for the rich and a Supreme Court in hock to plutocrats.
The funny thing is that Washington DC (the place rather than the concept) is actually a nice place and almost certainly a much nicer place than the places where the people telling you not to go to Washington live. Especially the bits that anyone actually visiting Washington would go to.
I remember Andrew Sullivan (who lives there) describing how awful the climate is in winter and summer.
Before the creation of air conditioning and in its original configuration of marshy(?) ground, it was considered as a hardship posting by foreign ambassadors posted there.
That would be the reason why Thatcher offered Heath the job of US Ambassador in 1979. Obviously Heath declined the offer.
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
Have they 'tapped into dissatisfaction' with Washington - or have they simply succeeded in making it a scapegoat for the general problems of life ?
"In fairness, the Democrats have helped to facilitate the Trump narrative — and therefore his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. His political rise should have initiated a genuine soul-searching among a humiliated establishment. But rather than consider their failures toward the American people, who continue to turn to a carnival barker for relief, the policymaking elite have concluded that it is they who have been failed — by the people. The result, as we are starting to see, is the exacerbation of America’s prevailing divisions. In this, New Hampshire serves as both a symptom and an inflammatory — not for a civil war between North and South, but a clash within each city and state."
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
Is that the one who seriously overstepped the mark by entering a house and removing jewelry because it was “proceeds of crime”?
Another symptom of declining Britain. Let's have a consultation on the best way to provide a worse public service, in this case Royal Mail.
Since the only things I get through the post seem to be junk mail, tax bills and traffic fines I'd be happy if they stopped delivering altogether.
Kind of why RM is in a bit of a death spiral having failed to invest properly since privatisation - with the money going out as dividends that should have been invested in making it competitive with the non-Amazon delivery firms.
If you can't provide a regular and reliable service, people and firms stop using you for anything useful that needs to reach someone urgently or promptly. So your revenue decreases and you provide a worse service. Three or five days a week would just worsen that problem.
Another legacy of the many failures of the Tory Party over the past 14 years.
But prior to privatisation, Gordon Brown was using RM as a cash cow, also depriving it of investment.
A fine example of the first rule of PB: if any subject is discussed for suffient time it will eventually be blamed on Gordon Brown.
Gordwin's Law
Gordon Brown wasn't responsible for the crash of R100.
I read somewhere that Gordon Brown was responsibe for the Boing 737 door-patch bolts falling out.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
My son is applying for politics at university and has selected Bath, Warwick, York, Sheffield and Durham.
Which would you recommend if not York?
Aberystwyth.
Yes, I am serious. It's a better department than any of those. Just not Russell Group (but then nor is Bath).
Unfortunately those are the univeristies he selected on this UCAS form.
Well, York is a lovely city. And in many respects an excellent uni. But it isn't the uni I personally would choose for a degree in Politics.
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
Immigration. The Dems are seen as the “open the borders” party. Really not popular in flyover America. indeed, increasingly less popular in big cities, with the surge in migrants sent from Texas to NYC, Chicago, etc
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse)
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
If we had a genuine market in higher education economics and engineering at Cambridge, Medicine at Imperial and law at Oxford would have the highest fees, creative arts at Manchester Met or Coventry for instance would have the least.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Possibly also Burt Rutan or R. J. Mitchell.
The wartime ones are probably well known, Sydney Camm, de Haviland, RJ Mitchell you've mentioned. Quite likely we could name the German ones too!
[INTRO: a smoke-filled club in the 1960s. A man is onstage with a tinsel curtain speaking into a mike]
"...Willy Messerschmitt? More like Won't-y Messerschmitt, if you ask me. Dirty Fokker, that's all I can say. Are you alright, missus? They can't touch you for it..."
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
But where does the hatred come from? Is it part of the American psyche to distrust government? Does it reflect a very large country, so the political “centre” always feels remote? Or is right-wing media constantly lying, scapegoating ‘Washington’ for the ills of deindustrialisation and the actions of big business?
What did all that disaffection get people in Trump’s first term? A ballooning deficit, tax cuts for the rich and a Supreme Court in hock to plutocrats.
The funny thing is that Washington DC (the place rather than the concept) is actually a nice place and almost certainly a much nicer place than the places where the people telling you not to go to Washington live. Especially the bits that anyone actually visiting Washington would go to.
And of course, I went there anyway, and you are right. The area north of the centre, with its period houses, on street parking, and tree-lined streets, wasn't unlike a London street.
Funnily enough, on the ship home I met someone who worked in government at Washington (some kind of middle to senior official, I think) and I happened to mention that everywhere I went, ordinary Americans had seemed very hostile towards Washington - and, to my surprise, she completely lost it, started shouting at me things like "where do these people think their services come from?" and "who is it that keeps them safe?" and there was no more discussion to be had - I just had to flee at the first opportunity. She seemed at least as angry as the most agitated of those who'd told me not to go there!
Yeah everyone in America is angry, it's nuts. Too much coffee and not enough holidays is my theory.
I lived in Washington DC for five years, on Capitol Hill just a few blocks from the Capitol building. It was a really idyllic place. I even attended the Obama inauguration. Lovely light, beautiful warm springs and autumns, short winters, and while a lot of people complained about the summer heat I quite liked it. Loads of great restaurants and bars. Attractive tree-lined streets. Good public transport by US standards. It really is a great city, part of me wishes we were still there although London will always be my #1.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
My son is applying for politics at university and has selected Bath, Warwick, York, Sheffield and Durham.
Which would you recommend if not York?
Aberystwyth.
Yes, I am serious. It's a better department than any of those. Just not Russell Group (but then nor is Bath).
Unfortunately those are the univeristies he selected on this UCAS form.
Thats no problem. He could always try being obnoxious at interview and thus fail to get any offers. He can also withdraw and then go back into clearing. There are routes, but take professional advice...
Well we will be going around the university offer days to try and help the decision making process.
I interview dozens of UCAS applicants each year. My favourite was one who when asked why they wanted to study pharmacy, said "I don't". I laughed and pressed on, but returned two more times to that question with the same response. On digging deeper it turned out the kid wanted to study English but her parents were set on her studying and becoming a pharmacist (to take over the business). Her plan was clearly to get reject five times (I obliged), each time being 'baffled' as to why, then go somewhere for English through clearing. I have no idea how it ended, but it was funny... (But also a little sad - parents should really let their kids make their own way through life).
I used to have to do UCAS interviews when I was at a well known London Uni. It was a completely pointless exercise, as all the students who turned up for the interview were made an offer.
Thankfully there are no prospective student interviews at German Unis
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
Immigration. The Dems are seen as the “open the borders” party. Really not popular in flyover America. indeed, increasingly less popular in big cities, with the surge in migrants sent from Texas to NYC, Chicago, etc
But they Red states are just sending them to sanctuary cities so, surely, these democrat run cities are simply getting the influx of people they wanted in the first place ?
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Sikorsky; von Karman (a genuine genius): Antonov; Lee Atwood; Mitchell; Mikoyan..
If you can't provide a regular and reliable service, people and firms stop using you for anything useful that needs to reach someone urgently or promptly. So your revenue decreases and you provide a worse service. Three or five days a week would just worsen that problem.
It's hard to see how Royal Mail get out of this death spiral. The letters business is dying, but RM now needs massive investment to offer a level of parcel service their competitors have had for years.
The customer experience they offer is wretched; my big personal bug-bear is redelivery and collection. If I'm not in RM will not leave a package on the doorstep, even though I live in a sleepy village where nothing ever gets nicked. The package goes back to the delivery office in another town, which is officially open 8am-10am but is often closed anyway. Redelivery can't be booked for next day, only the day after.
I actively avoid ordering anything that's delivered by RM unless there's no other option. Professionally, I still use them but only because every package I ship is small enough to go through a letterbox. That will change later this year and there's zero chance RM will be getting my large package business.
According to this survey of online consumers, Royal Mail was the best ranked delivery company and TNT the worst
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
Is that the one who seriously overstepped the mark by entering a house and removing jewelry because it was “proceeds of crime”?
He really isn’t doing himself any favours
Do you mean this? He stole jewellery from the SPM's mother even though the SPM was never charged?
Starting to wonder if the ITV drama didn't go far enough!
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Possibly also Burt Rutan or R. J. Mitchell.
The wartime ones are probably well known, Sydney Camm, de Haviland, RJ Mitchell you've mentioned. Quite likely we could name the German ones too!
[INTRO: a smoke-filled club in the 1960s. A man is onstage with a tinsel curtain speaking into a mike]
"...Willy Messerschmitt? More like Won't-y Messerschmitt, if you ask me. Dirty Fokker, that's all I can say. Are you alright, missus? They can't touch you for it..."
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
But where does the hatred come from? Is it part of the American psyche to distrust government? Does it reflect a very large country, so the political “centre” always feels remote? Or is right-wing media constantly lying, scapegoating ‘Washington’ for the ills of deindustrialisation and the actions of big business?
What did all that disaffection get people in Trump’s first term? A ballooning deficit, tax cuts for the rich and a Supreme Court in hock to plutocrats.
The funny thing is that Washington DC (the place rather than the concept) is actually a nice place and almost certainly a much nicer place than the places where the people telling you not to go to Washington live. Especially the bits that anyone actually visiting Washington would go to.
I remember Andrew Sullivan (who lives there) describing how awful the climate is in winter and summer.
I disagree actually. The winter is colder than in London but a lot shorter. Summer is hot and sultry but I don't mind a bit of heat. And the rest of the year is absolutely gorgeous. And much lighter than the UK as it's so much further south.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
My son is applying for politics at university and has selected Bath, Warwick, York, Sheffield and Durham.
Which would you recommend if not York?
Aberystwyth.
Yes, I am serious. It's a better department than any of those. Just not Russell Group (but then nor is Bath).
Unfortunately those are the univeristies he selected on this UCAS form.
Thats no problem. He could always try being obnoxious at interview and thus fail to get any offers. He can also withdraw and then go back into clearing. There are routes, but take professional advice...
Well we will be going around the university offer days to try and help the decision making process.
I interview dozens of UCAS applicants each year. My favourite was one who when asked why they wanted to study pharmacy, said "I don't". I laughed and pressed on, but returned two more times to that question with the same response. On digging deeper it turned out the kid wanted to study English but her parents were set on her studying and becoming a pharmacist (to take over the business). Her plan was clearly to get reject five times (I obliged), each time being 'baffled' as to why, then go somewhere for English through clearing. I have no idea how it ended, but it was funny... (But also a little sad - parents should really let their kids make their own way through life).
I used to have to do UCAS interviews when I was at a well known London Uni. It was a completely pointless exercise, as all the students who turned up for the interview were made an offer.
Thankfully there are no prospective student interviews at German Unis
We don't see it as pointless - we are selling ourselves to students. I.e. we know they have five choices, so if it were random we would only get 20% to pick us as first choice. In reality we get 40% or higher, and the cuddly interview with a nice academic is part of that. Its a lot of work, but as one of the Deans said last week, student pay our wages...
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
Immigration. The Dems are seen as the “open the borders” party. Really not popular in flyover America. indeed, increasingly less popular in big cities, with the surge in migrants sent from Texas to NYC, Chicago, etc
There’s an almighty row brewing in Texas, between State and Federal police, over the border.
The Texas National Guard, directed by Gov Abbott, have been installing razor wire to try and stop immigrants crossing the river that marks the border. The Federal Border Patrol, under the direction of Biden, have been removing it, stating their primary jurisdiction over the border. So far, the Supreme Court has sided with the Feds, but Abbott isn’t backing down.
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
Is that the one who seriously overstepped the mark by entering a house and removing jewelry because it was “proceeds of crime”?
He really isn’t doing himself any favours
Do you mean this? He stole jewellery from the SPM's mother even though the SPM was never charged?
Starting to wonder if the ITV drama didn't go far enough!
Is a private company allowed to seize items under the Proceeds of Crime Act? Which, as I understand it, is a power granted to governments to seize items purchased by drug barons?
More to the point, doesn't that only apply to items purchased after the alleged crime has occurred?
I'm struggling to see how those two including Mr I Was Very Busy So Couldn't Do A Proper Statement aren't doing time for theft.
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Barnes Wallis was an SE14 man, he attended my son's school (it was a grammar then) and there's a blue plaque for him locally. Also a vegetarian! According to Wiki he and his wife adopted her sister's children after their parents were killed in an air raid, which given his role in perhaps the most famous British air raid of WW2 has a certain piquancy.
I think there are a few more.
Sir Frank Whittle, perhaps?
An interesting point is how few are post war. The only recent well-known-ish projects I can think of that have had some attention (excluding military who are kept quiet) would perhaps be Thrust-II, Hotol and their successors.
Gwynne Shotwell And Elon Musk at SpaceX.
It’s a weird field, as not very many people become famous outside of the field.
We could also add Ross Brawn, James Allison, and a few more of the F1 boys and girls who studied aeronautics.
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
But where does the hatred come from? Is it part of the American psyche to distrust government? Does it reflect a very large country, so the political “centre” always feels remote? Or is right-wing media constantly lying, scapegoating ‘Washington’ for the ills of deindustrialisation and the actions of big business?
What did all that disaffection get people in Trump’s first term? A ballooning deficit, tax cuts for the rich and a Supreme Court in hock to plutocrats.
The funny thing is that Washington DC (the place rather than the concept) is actually a nice place and almost certainly a much nicer place than the places where the people telling you not to go to Washington live. Especially the bits that anyone actually visiting Washington would go to.
I remember Andrew Sullivan (who lives there) describing how awful the climate is in winter and summer.
I disagree actually. The winter is colder than in London but a lot shorter. Summer is hot and sultry but I don't mind a bit of heat. And the rest of the year is absolutely gorgeous. And much lighter than the UK as it's so much further south.
DC is phenomenally ugly, apart from the few bits that look like an English Georgian town, like, er, Georgetown
And it is insanely humid in high summer
And somewhere like Tennessee, where they moan about DC, is generally nicer than DC
Prosperous rural Tennessee can be positively Edenic; I believe it has pockets that are amongst the wealthiest in the USA
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
Is that the one who seriously overstepped the mark by entering a house and removing jewelry because it was “proceeds of crime”?
He really isn’t doing himself any favours
Do you mean this? He stole jewellery from the SPM's mother even though the SPM was never charged?
Starting to wonder if the ITV drama didn't go far enough!
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Possibly also Burt Rutan or R. J. Mitchell.
The wartime ones are probably well known, Sydney Camm, de Haviland, RJ Mitchell you've mentioned. Quite likely we could name the German ones too!
[INTRO: a smoke-filled club in the 1960s. A man is onstage with a tinsel curtain speaking into a mike]
"...Willy Messerschmitt? More like Won't-y Messerschmitt, if you ask me. Dirty Fokker, that's all I can say. Are you alright, missus? They can't touch you for it..."
University funding is weird. Let’s say the government puts out a call for research in some area, say machine learning applications in medicine. We at a university(ies) write a proposal. This obviously has to be carefully budgeted. If we win, if our proposal is chosen, the government then gives us 80% of the budget required.
You may well see a flaw in this system. Research (mostly) loses universities money and has to be subsidised by other activity. Teaching home undergraduates is probably done at a loss now. The main thing that turns a good profit margin is overseas students, particularly postgraduate.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Sikorsky; von Karman (a genuine genius): Antonov; Lee Atwood; Mitchell; Mikoyan..
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
But where does the hatred come from? Is it part of the American psyche to distrust government? Does it reflect a very large country, so the political “centre” always feels remote? Or is right-wing media constantly lying, scapegoating ‘Washington’ for the ills of deindustrialisation and the actions of big business?
What did all that disaffection get people in Trump’s first term? A ballooning deficit, tax cuts for the rich and a Supreme Court in hock to plutocrats.
The funny thing is that Washington DC (the place rather than the concept) is actually a nice place and almost certainly a much nicer place than the places where the people telling you not to go to Washington live. Especially the bits that anyone actually visiting Washington would go to.
And of course, I went there anyway, and you are right. The area north of the centre, with its period houses, on street parking, and tree-lined streets, wasn't unlike a London street.
Funnily enough, on the ship home I met someone who worked in government at Washington (some kind of middle to senior official, I think) and I happened to mention that everywhere I went, ordinary Americans had seemed very hostile towards Washington - and, to my surprise, she completely lost it, started shouting at me things like "where do these people think their services come from?" and "who is it that keeps them safe?" and there was no more discussion to be had - I just had to flee at the first opportunity. She seemed at least as angry as the most agitated of those who'd told me not to go there!
Yeah everyone in America is angry, it's nuts. Too much coffee and not enough holidays is my theory.
I lived in Washington DC for five years, on Capitol Hill just a few blocks from the Capitol building. It was a really idyllic place. I even attended the Obama inauguration. Lovely light, beautiful warm springs and autumns, short winters, and while a lot of people complained about the summer heat I quite liked it. Loads of great restaurants and bars. Attractive tree-lined streets. Good public transport by US standards. It really is a great city, part of me wishes we were still there although London will always be my #1.
I agree. The climate in DC is wonderful. Snow in winter, hot and sulty in summer. Proper seasons
I visited a few years back (in June). Could be the best city I've ever visited.
University funding is weird. Let’s say the government puts out a call for research in some area, say machine learning applications in medicine. We at a university(ies) write a proposal. This obviously has to be carefully budgeted. If we win, if our proposal is chosen, the government then gives us 80% of the budget required.
You may well see a flaw in this system. Research (mostly) loses universities money and has to be subsidised by other activity. Teaching home undergraduates is probably done at a loss now. The main thing that turns a good profit margin is overseas students, particularly postgraduate.
And at the moment China, which is such a big market, between sanctions and economic slowdown is not exactly splashing the cash.
You see the same in schools, actually. Last year maybe 40% of my income came from China. This year, maybe 2%.
That is partly because of the amount I'm earning elsewhere, but numbers of Chinese students have dropped right off.
An interesting start to today's Post Office proceedings.
The witness has only provided a two and a half page statement, because he was so busy over Christmas with his current job at a homeless charity, and also walking his dog.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Those Mickey Mouse or similar art subjects are the ones that have subsidized STEM costs ever since this system was implemented
At the cost of making sure these MM graduates can never afford to repay their debts, and at a cost to the government of billions in write-offs.
If government wants to subsidise useful degrees (medicine, nursing, engineering etc) then do it directly.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Those Mickey Mouse or similar art subjects are the ones that have subsidized STEM costs ever since this system was implemented
Depends on the subject. Computer Science isn't expensive to run, generally. Chemistry is.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
My son is applying for politics at university and has selected Bath, Warwick, York, Sheffield and Durham.
Which would you recommend if not York?
Aberystwyth.
Yes, I am serious. It's a better department than any of those. Just not Russell Group (but then nor is Bath).
Unfortunately those are the univeristies he selected on this UCAS form.
Thats no problem. He could always try being obnoxious at interview and thus fail to get any offers. He can also withdraw and then go back into clearing. There are routes, but take professional advice...
You mean “some bloke on pb.com” doesn’t count as “expert advice”?
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
This is possible isn't it?
Well it’s possible if you question the competency of the court of appeal.
But it’s not a good look and I suspect drives from an unwilliness to accept that he himself did things that were at best dubious and in reality downright illegal
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
Seems strange to say but irrelevant IMO.
A handful of the hundreds of prosecuted SPMs may in fact be guilty of stealing but we will never know - and where money did actually disappear, rather than it being a figment of Horizon's imagination, how do we know it was the SPM that took it rather than one of his/her staff?
All convictions are unsafe where the money trail was not established - all must be overturned.
Another symptom of declining Britain. Let's have a consultation on the best way to provide a worse public service, in this case Royal Mail.
Since the only things I get through the post seem to be junk mail, tax bills and traffic fines I'd be happy if they stopped delivering altogether.
Kind of why RM is in a bit of a death spiral having failed to invest properly since privatisation - with the money going out as dividends that should have been invested in making it competitive with the non-Amazon delivery firms.
If you can't provide a regular and reliable service, people and firms stop using you for anything useful that needs to reach someone urgently or promptly. So your revenue decreases and you provide a worse service. Three or five days a week would just worsen that problem.
Another legacy of the many failures of the Tory Party over the past 14 years.
But prior to privatisation, Gordon Brown was using RM as a cash cow, also depriving it of investment.
A fine example of the first rule of PB: if any subject is discussed for suffient time it will eventually be blamed on Gordon Brown.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
My son is applying for politics at university and has selected Bath, Warwick, York, Sheffield and Durham.
Which would you recommend if not York?
Aberystwyth.
Yes, I am serious. It's a better department than any of those. Just not Russell Group (but then nor is Bath).
Unfortunately those are the univeristies he selected on this UCAS form.
Thats no problem. He could always try being obnoxious at interview and thus fail to get any offers. He can also withdraw and then go back into clearing. There are routes, but take professional advice...
You mean “some bloke on pb.com” doesn’t count as “expert advice”?
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Those Mickey Mouse or similar art subjects are the ones that have subsidized STEM costs ever since this system was implemented
Depends on the subject. Computer Science isn't expensive to run, generally. Chemistry is.
I did mathematical sciences, which couldn't have been that expensive to run tbh. The STE part of STEM, not cheap. The M part - not so much unless the uni is going to invest in a whole bunch of Nvidia GPUs for numerical solutions to long/tricky matrix/differential equations.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Possibly also Burt Rutan or R. J. Mitchell.
The wartime ones are probably well known, Sydney Camm, de Haviland, RJ Mitchell you've mentioned. Quite likely we could name the German ones too!
[INTRO: a smoke-filled club in the 1960s. A man is onstage with a tinsel curtain speaking into a mike]
"...Willy Messerschmitt? More like Won't-y Messerschmitt, if you ask me. Dirty Fokker, that's all I can say. Are you alright, missus? They can't touch you for it..."
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
My son is applying for politics at university and has selected Bath, Warwick, York, Sheffield and Durham.
Which would you recommend if not York?
Aberystwyth.
Yes, I am serious. It's a better department than any of those. Just not Russell Group (but then nor is Bath).
Unfortunately those are the univeristies he selected on this UCAS form.
Thats no problem. He could always try being obnoxious at interview and thus fail to get any offers. He can also withdraw and then go back into clearing. There are routes, but take professional advice...
Well we will be going around the university offer days to try and help the decision making process.
I interview dozens of UCAS applicants each year. My favourite was one who when asked why they wanted to study pharmacy, said "I don't". I laughed and pressed on, but returned two more times to that question with the same response. On digging deeper it turned out the kid wanted to study English but her parents were set on her studying and becoming a pharmacist (to take over the business). Her plan was clearly to get reject five times (I obliged), each time being 'baffled' as to why, then go somewhere for English through clearing. I have no idea how it ended, but it was funny... (But also a little sad - parents should really let their kids make their own way through life).
I used to have to do UCAS interviews when I was at a well known London Uni. It was a completely pointless exercise, as all the students who turned up for the interview were made an offer.
Thankfully there are no prospective student interviews at German Unis
We don't see it as pointless - we are selling ourselves to students. I.e. we know they have five choices, so if it were random we would only get 20% to pick us as first choice. In reality we get 40% or higher, and the cuddly interview with a nice academic is part of that. Its a lot of work, but as one of the Deans said last week, student pay our wages...
Yes but it is a zero-sum game. Your win is Oxford's loss. In aggregate, interviews (probably) add nothing. They might even be harmful in oversubscribed subjects, given the number of medical students who fall out of love with medicine.
And if university interviews were abolished, matching students to courses could be done by a moderately powered computer *after* A-level results are published.
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
Seems strange to say but irrelevant IMO.
A handful of the hundreds of prosecuted SPMs may in fact be guilty of stealing but we will never know - and where money did actually disappear, rather than it being a figment of Horizon's imagination, how do we know it was the SPM that took it rather than one of his/her staff?
All convictions are unsafe where the money trail was not established - all must be overturned.
Any proceedings that involved Horizon evidence, are now unsafe by definition.
Another symptom of declining Britain. Let's have a consultation on the best way to provide a worse public service, in this case Royal Mail.
Since the only things I get through the post seem to be junk mail, tax bills and traffic fines I'd be happy if they stopped delivering altogether.
Kind of why RM is in a bit of a death spiral having failed to invest properly since privatisation - with the money going out as dividends that should have been invested in making it competitive with the non-Amazon delivery firms.
If you can't provide a regular and reliable service, people and firms stop using you for anything useful that needs to reach someone urgently or promptly. So your revenue decreases and you provide a worse service. Three or five days a week would just worsen that problem.
Another legacy of the many failures of the Tory Party over the past 14 years.
But prior to privatisation, Gordon Brown was using RM as a cash cow, also depriving it of investment.
A fine example of the first rule of PB: if any subject is discussed for suffient time it will eventually be blamed on Gordon Brown.
Gordwin's Law
Or Brownian motion?
Some things are Blair’s fault, not Brpwn’s.
They are known as Gordian Nots.
And Gordon riots when he gets the blame for Blairism.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Those Mickey Mouse or similar art subjects are the ones that have subsidized STEM costs ever since this system was implemented
Depends on the subject. Computer Science isn't expensive to run, generally. Chemistry is.
I did mathematical sciences, which couldn't have been that expensive to run tbh. The STE part of STEM, not cheap. The M part - not so much unless the uni is going to invest in a whole bunch of Nvidia GPUs for numerical solutions to long/tricky matrix/differential equations.
In the early days of research assessment by grant income, Birkbeck complained their star physicist, David Bohm, needed only a pencil and paper.
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
Seems strange to say but irrelevant IMO.
A handful of the hundreds of prosecuted SPMs may in fact be guilty of stealing but we will never know - and where money did actually disappear, rather than it being a figment of Horizon's imagination, how do we know it was the SPM that took it rather than one of his/her staff?
All convictions are unsafe where the money trail was not established - all must be overturned.
I'm not sure they ever bothered with establishing dishonesty by any means other than Horizon. Such broader investigations appear to have been mere window-dressing, because the assumption was Horizon couldn't be wrong.
If that is so, all the convictions are unsafe. No doubt this would include where there was indeed some genuine dishonesty, although common sense would suggest the number of such cases and amounts involved would be small.
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
Seems strange to say but irrelevant IMO.
A handful of the hundreds of prosecuted SPMs may in fact be guilty of stealing but we will never know - and where money did actually disappear, rather than it being a figment of Horizon's imagination, how do we know it was the SPM that took it rather than one of his/her staff?
All convictions are unsafe where the money trail was not established - all must be overturned.
I'm not sure they ever bothered with establishing dishonesty by any means other than Horizon. Such broader investigations appear to have been mere window-dressing, because the assumption was Horizon couldn't be wrong.
If that is so, all the convictions are unsafe. No doubt this would include where there was indeed some genuine dishonesty, although common sense would suggest the number of such cases and amounts involved would be small.
All the private prosecutions are unsafe - but what about the 11 police/CPS prosecutions? Please tell me there was more evidence than just Horizon.
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
Seems strange to say but irrelevant IMO.
A handful of the hundreds of prosecuted SPMs may in fact be guilty of stealing but we will never know - and where money did actually disappear, rather than it being a figment of Horizon's imagination, how do we know it was the SPM that took it rather than one of his/her staff?
All convictions are unsafe where the money trail was not established - all must be overturned.
I'm not sure they ever bothered with establishing dishonesty by any means other than Horizon. Such broader investigations appear to have been mere window-dressing, because the assumption was Horizon couldn't be wrong.
If that is so, all the convictions are unsafe. No doubt this would include where there was indeed some genuine dishonesty, although common sense would suggest the number of such cases and amounts involved would be small.
All the private prosecutions are unsafe - but what about the 11 police/CPS prosecutions? Please tell me there was more evidence than just Horizon.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
Seems strange to say but irrelevant IMO.
A handful of the hundreds of prosecuted SPMs may in fact be guilty of stealing but we will never know - and where money did actually disappear, rather than it being a figment of Horizon's imagination, how do we know it was the SPM that took it rather than one of his/her staff?
All convictions are unsafe where the money trail was not established - all must be overturned.
I'm not sure they ever bothered with establishing dishonesty by any means other than Horizon. Such broader investigations appear to have been mere window-dressing, because the assumption was Horizon couldn't be wrong.
If that is so, all the convictions are unsafe. No doubt this would include where there was indeed some genuine dishonesty, although common sense would suggest the number of such cases and amounts involved would be small.
I'd need to know more, but the Scots do seem to have downgraded Horizon evidence very substantially after 2013 or so. Yet IIRC there were prosecutions after that - but in turn some[edit] or indeed all might be the ones who were browbeaten into admitting guilt so nobody outsider the PO had anything to do (except the judge for the sentencing).
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
But where does the hatred come from? Is it part of the American psyche to distrust government? Does it reflect a very large country, so the political “centre” always feels remote? Or is right-wing media constantly lying, scapegoating ‘Washington’ for the ills of deindustrialisation and the actions of big business?
What did all that disaffection get people in Trump’s first term? A ballooning deficit, tax cuts for the rich and a Supreme Court in hock to plutocrats.
The funny thing is that Washington DC (the place rather than the concept) is actually a nice place and almost certainly a much nicer place than the places where the people telling you not to go to Washington live. Especially the bits that anyone actually visiting Washington would go to.
I remember Andrew Sullivan (who lives there) describing how awful the climate is in winter and summer.
I disagree actually. The winter is colder than in London but a lot shorter. Summer is hot and sultry but I don't mind a bit of heat. And the rest of the year is absolutely gorgeous. And much lighter than the UK as it's so much further south.
DC is phenomenally ugly, apart from the few bits that look like an English Georgian town, like, er, Georgetown
And it is insanely humid in high summer
And somewhere like Tennessee, where they moan about DC, is generally nicer than DC
Prosperous rural Tennessee can be positively Edenic; I believe it has pockets that are amongst the wealthiest in the USA
We'll have to agree to disagree about it I'm afraid, and what do I know, I only lived there for five years. Most of the city bears a closer resemblance to Georgetown than to the big neoclassical slabs in the centre. Most is 19C Victorian red brick, low rise, with shady tree lined streets. It's not that humid in summer unless you've only ever lived in Northern Europe. Tennessee is hotter than DC. I had a holiday in Eastern Tennessee, the scenery was beautiful and Dollywood was fun but it didn't seem like it was in great shape, it was mostly run down strip malls and an incredibly large number of churches. It didn't strike me as a great place to live unless you really liked going to church and Dunkin Donuts.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
Have they 'tapped into dissatisfaction' with Washington - or have they simply succeeded in making it a scapegoat for the general problems of life ?
"In fairness, the Democrats have helped to facilitate the Trump narrative — and therefore his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. His political rise should have initiated a genuine soul-searching among a humiliated establishment. But rather than consider their failures toward the American people, who continue to turn to a carnival barker for relief, the policymaking elite have concluded that it is they who have been failed — by the people. The result, as we are starting to see, is the exacerbation of America’s prevailing divisions. In this, New Hampshire serves as both a symptom and an inflammatory — not for a civil war between North and South, but a clash within each city and state."
These articles try and justify why some voters have supported Trump . The cry of the dispossessed. When sadly Trump just forments anger and division . The only party that tries to improve life for the majority are the Dems . The GOP with their policies take from the poor to give to the rich and yet a whole lot of people continue to vote against their own interests . People continue to make excuses for the Trump Cult . They are mostly just anger filled bigots trying to find any scapegoat.
There's probably a huge disparity in the types of people who still rely on the Royal Mail for delivering important documents. Older and poorer people probably use it a lot, where younger and wealthier people almost entirely use electronic methods of communication.
Nope, if I want to send important documents I will use DPD, DHL, or FedEx or at a push Hays DX.
Royal Mail would be my second last choice after Evri.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
But where does the hatred come from? Is it part of the American psyche to distrust government? Does it reflect a very large country, so the political “centre” always feels remote? Or is right-wing media constantly lying, scapegoating ‘Washington’ for the ills of deindustrialisation and the actions of big business?
What did all that disaffection get people in Trump’s first term? A ballooning deficit, tax cuts for the rich and a Supreme Court in hock to plutocrats.
The funny thing is that Washington DC (the place rather than the concept) is actually a nice place and almost certainly a much nicer place than the places where the people telling you not to go to Washington live. Especially the bits that anyone actually visiting Washington would go to.
I remember Andrew Sullivan (who lives there) describing how awful the climate is in winter and summer.
I disagree actually. The winter is colder than in London but a lot shorter. Summer is hot and sultry but I don't mind a bit of heat. And the rest of the year is absolutely gorgeous. And much lighter than the UK as it's so much further south.
DC is phenomenally ugly, apart from the few bits that look like an English Georgian town, like, er, Georgetown
And it is insanely humid in high summer
And somewhere like Tennessee, where they moan about DC, is generally nicer than DC
Prosperous rural Tennessee can be positively Edenic; I believe it has pockets that are amongst the wealthiest in the USA
We'll have to agree to disagree about it I'm afraid, and what do I know, I only lived there for five years. Most of the city bears a closer resemblance to Georgetown than to the big neoclassical slabs in the centre. Most is 19C Victorian red brick, low rise, with shady tree lined streets. It's not that humid in summer unless you've only ever lived in Northern Europe. Tennessee is hotter than DC. I had a holiday in Eastern Tennessee, the scenery was beautiful and Dollywood was fun but it didn't seem like it was in great shape, it was mostly run down strip malls and an incredibly large number of churches. It didn't strike me as a great place to live unless you really liked going to church and Dunkin Donuts.
Fair enough. You have more experience of DC than me, but then I have seen a lot more of the world than you, so it’s probably a wash
I think part of my disappointment was coz DC - up to that point - was the last, most famous city on earth that I had NOT seen, along with Rio (still haven’t seen Rio). And it looms so large in everyone’s mental map. The White House. The Capitol. The Mall
And then you get there and the White House is this tiny pleasant quasi-Georgian white building surrounded by wire and guards and bristling guns and the Capitol is a faintly ludicrous white boob and the other memorials - Washington Monument, Lincoln, Vietnam, etc - are laughably bombastic, indeed vulgar. More Nicolae Ceaucescu than Louis Quatorze. And when it is not bombastic, central DC is simply hideous - massive 70s and 80s and 90s slabs of steroidal dreck
@SeaShantyIrish2 gave a good explanation for this when i was moaning about it during my visit. There is a height limit in DC so the government buildings have to maximise their floor space beneath that, so they all look small yet simultaneously overblown and stuffed - like a midget who has been to the gym 24/7/365
i accept the burbs must be much nicer
You’ve been to the wrong bits of Tennessee! It can be absurdly lovely AND rich. Eg Williamson County
“Research ranked Williamson County as America's wealthiest county (1st) when the local cost of living was factored into the equation with median household income.[21]”
From my experience anti-English hatred is endemic everywhere in Wales.
How a Welsh town became a hotbed of anti-English hatred
A poison pen letter sent to an Aberystwyth resident reveals a potentially ‘toxic’ attitude towards the English as second homes proliferate
Located in a leafy suburb less than a mile from the sea, Iorwerth Avenue in Aberystwyth is understandably a sought-after place to live.
Its residents are a mix of lawyers and councillors, both Welsh and English, and the general consensus is that most people know each other and get along well. Yet recently, that has changed.
A well-known and “popular” resident hailing from the Midlands received a poison pen letter, accusing him of being “low-life” and urging him to go back to “Brummyland”.
From my experience anti-English hatred is endemic everywhere in Wales.
How a Welsh town became a hotbed of anti-English hatred
A poison pen letter sent to an Aberystwyth resident reveals a potentially ‘toxic’ attitude towards the English as second homes proliferate
Located in a leafy suburb less than a mile from the sea, Iorwerth Avenue in Aberystwyth is understandably a sought-after place to live.
Its residents are a mix of lawyers and councillors, both Welsh and English, and the general consensus is that most people know each other and get along well. Yet recently, that has changed.
A well-known and “popular” resident hailing from the Midlands received a poison pen letter, accusing him of being “low-life” and urging him to go back to “Brummyland”.
One thing I have learned from all my travels is this. The key to national happiness is not to be rich. Otherwise France or America (etc) would be the happiest places on earth, and they definitely are not
What you need for national happiness is for people to be getting richER, and with a sense this will continue. So they can be really quite poor, but if they assess that things are improving, they are happy
Cambodia is a good example of this. It’s a seriously poor country. GDP per capita is less than $2000
But they are - it seems to me, and I’ve been here a lot in the last 12 months - some of the happiest people anywhere. There is a national cheeriness. And then you notice that their economy grew 7% a year, for a solid decade, pre-pandemic
In other words, it's hope for the future that keeps people going. Things start to get nasty when people feel their best days are behind them, ie. Trump supporters, AfD in Germany.
From my experience anti-English hatred is endemic everywhere in Wales.
How a Welsh town became a hotbed of anti-English hatred
A poison pen letter sent to an Aberystwyth resident reveals a potentially ‘toxic’ attitude towards the English as second homes proliferate
Located in a leafy suburb less than a mile from the sea, Iorwerth Avenue in Aberystwyth is understandably a sought-after place to live.
Its residents are a mix of lawyers and councillors, both Welsh and English, and the general consensus is that most people know each other and get along well. Yet recently, that has changed.
A well-known and “popular” resident hailing from the Midlands received a poison pen letter, accusing him of being “low-life” and urging him to go back to “Brummyland”.
Another symptom of declining Britain. Let's have a consultation on the best way to provide a worse public service, in this case Royal Mail.
Since the only things I get through the post seem to be junk mail, tax bills and traffic fines I'd be happy if they stopped delivering altogether.
Kind of why RM is in a bit of a death spiral having failed to invest properly since privatisation - with the money going out as dividends that should have been invested in making it competitive with the non-Amazon delivery firms.
If you can't provide a regular and reliable service, people and firms stop using you for anything useful that needs to reach someone urgently or promptly. So your revenue decreases and you provide a worse service. Three or five days a week would just worsen that problem.
Another legacy of the many failures of the Tory Party over the past 14 years.
But prior to privatisation, Gordon Brown was using RM as a cash cow, also depriving it of investment.
A fine example of the first rule of PB: if any subject is discussed for suffient time it will eventually be blamed on Gordon Brown.
Gordwin's Law
Gordon Brown wasn't responsible for the crash of R100.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Barnes Wallis was an SE14 man, he attended my son's school (it was a grammar then) and there's a blue plaque for him locally. Also a vegetarian! According to Wiki he and his wife adopted her sister's children after their parents were killed in an air raid, which given his role in perhaps the most famous British air raid of WW2 has a certain piquancy.
I think there are a few more.
Sir Frank Whittle, perhaps?
An interesting point is how few are post war. The only recent well-known-ish projects I can think of that have had some attention (excluding military who are kept quiet) would perhaps be Thrust-II, Hotol and their successors.
Gwynne Shotwell And Elon Musk at SpaceX.
It’s a weird field, as not very many people become famous outside of the field.
We could also add Ross Brawn, James Allison, and a few more of the F1 boys and girls who studied aeronautics.
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
Have they 'tapped into dissatisfaction' with Washington - or have they simply succeeded in making it a scapegoat for the general problems of life ?
"In fairness, the Democrats have helped to facilitate the Trump narrative — and therefore his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. His political rise should have initiated a genuine soul-searching among a humiliated establishment. But rather than consider their failures toward the American people, who continue to turn to a carnival barker for relief, the policymaking elite have concluded that it is they who have been failed — by the people. The result, as we are starting to see, is the exacerbation of America’s prevailing divisions. In this, New Hampshire serves as both a symptom and an inflammatory — not for a civil war between North and South, but a clash within each city and state."
That last paragraph basically accepts Trump's premise, without any supporting analysis.
What precisely are the 'failures of the
establishment' ? And in what way are they 'blaming the people' ?
I blame Trump, myself. The GOP establishment, I suppose, has largely surrendered to him.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Possibly also Burt Rutan or R. J. Mitchell.
The wartime ones are probably well known, Sydney Camm, de Haviland, RJ Mitchell you've mentioned. Quite likely we could name the German ones too!
[INTRO: a smoke-filled club in the 1960s. A man is onstage with a tinsel curtain speaking into a mike]
"...Willy Messerschmitt? More like Won't-y Messerschmitt, if you ask me. Dirty Fokker, that's all I can say. Are you alright, missus? They can't touch you for it..."
First heard this gag around 1967, attributed to an entertainer called Blaster Bates who did a comic turn based on the use and misuse of explosives. Clearing sceptic tanks being a case in point.
From my experience anti-English hatred is endemic everywhere in Wales.
How a Welsh town became a hotbed of anti-English hatred
A poison pen letter sent to an Aberystwyth resident reveals a potentially ‘toxic’ attitude towards the English as second homes proliferate
Located in a leafy suburb less than a mile from the sea, Iorwerth Avenue in Aberystwyth is understandably a sought-after place to live.
Its residents are a mix of lawyers and councillors, both Welsh and English, and the general consensus is that most people know each other and get along well. Yet recently, that has changed.
A well-known and “popular” resident hailing from the Midlands received a poison pen letter, accusing him of being “low-life” and urging him to go back to “Brummyland”.
From my experience anti-English hatred is endemic everywhere in Wales.
How a Welsh town became a hotbed of anti-English hatred
A poison pen letter sent to an Aberystwyth resident reveals a potentially ‘toxic’ attitude towards the English as second homes proliferate
Located in a leafy suburb less than a mile from the sea, Iorwerth Avenue in Aberystwyth is understandably a sought-after place to live.
Its residents are a mix of lawyers and councillors, both Welsh and English, and the general consensus is that most people know each other and get along well. Yet recently, that has changed.
A well-known and “popular” resident hailing from the Midlands received a poison pen letter, accusing him of being “low-life” and urging him to go back to “Brummyland”.
“Located in a leafy suburb less than a mile from the sea, Iorwerth Avenue in Aberystwyth is understandably a sought-after place to live.”
Why? Aber is a nice place to live if you are not a thrill seeking, desperate to travel, hates the UK winter type.
It’s the use of the word “understandably”
As if everyone in the world KNOWS that somewhere a mile out of central Aberystwyth must be up there with St Trop and Mayfair and the Upper East Side and the best bits of Dubai in terms of desirability
That probably makes sense. There is a thriving market in private services at low cost.
OTOH it is one area of practical medicine that actually works and has substantial benefits. As a GP said to me nearly 40 years ago (in the days when GPs not nurses did this stuff) 'It's nice to do something that actually cures people'.
My area no longer offers it on the NHS.
And £50-£60 is low cost for most perhaps, but not for lots of people, and has to be added to optical/glasses charges, dental charges and so on.
It seems to me the overwhelming majority of quotidian medical issues are quite ordinary, unglamorous and not especially expensive. These are the things we should stick to, while being more cautious about treatments that cost millions.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
Agreed. The sooner we get rid of Classics, the better.
More seriously, if you do want to go down a proper market route you'd want to charge by degree anyway, because the quality of faculties in unis can vary so much. I've never heard anybody be rude about medicine at Oxford, but Classics, well. And Cambridge, science is excellent, English Literature, er... York must have one of the best History departments in the country, but its Politics course is a bit of a joke.
Of course, there is still a cachet to getting degrees from such places even if in practical terms they're not very educative. And the networking opportunities may be worth something. But should they really be paid for at the same level?
It won’t take long for the banks to work out which courses at which universities lead to loans being paid back, and which lead to loan defaults.
The likes of Classics are interesting, because those students probably do quite well in life for a whole load of reasons unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
Nevil Shute, on telling one of his father's friends he was going to Oxford to read engineering, was told, 'I've never known a engineering graduate from Oxford fail to succeed in life, but none of them have reached the top in engineering.'
Oddly, Shute himself arguably did reach the top in engineering, helping design an airship that unusually didn't crash or explode, founding a company that not only built the first aeroplane for the Royal Flight and the first production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage, but built over 8,000 twin engined trainers for the RAF in WWII, and working successfully on a number of classified research projects for the Navy in the war itself.
He is, however, best remembered as a novelist...
There are very very few (if any) famous aeronautical Engineers.
Kelly Johnson, Harrison Storms, Ed Heinemann - who knows who they are without Wikipedia?
In the UK a few people might know Barnes Wallis. Who was Shute's boss on R101, of course.
Possibly also Burt Rutan or R. J. Mitchell.
The wartime ones are probably well known, Sydney Camm, de Haviland, RJ Mitchell you've mentioned. Quite likely we could name the German ones too!
[INTRO: a smoke-filled club in the 1960s. A man is onstage with a tinsel curtain speaking into a mike]
"...Willy Messerschmitt? More like Won't-y Messerschmitt, if you ask me. Dirty Fokker, that's all I can say. Are you alright, missus? They can't touch you for it..."
First heard this gag around 1967, attributed to an entertainer called Blaster Bates who did a comic turn based on the use and misuse of explosives. Clearing sceptic tanks being a case in point.
See also the story of Douglas Bader giving a talk at a girls school.
I think American tipping culture is possible the biggest reason I could never live there, along with guns and race-war
I was just googling the Upper East Side (I am slightly bored) and I found a site dedicated to US travel and it has advice for how much you should tip if you go on holiday to NYC or spend some time there
This is just one chunk
How Much to Tip Non-Building Workers for the Holidays
Not sure who else to tip, aside from your building workers? While this will differ based on what services you utilize, here’s a list of workers and service providers that are vital to New Yorkers, along with holiday tipping suggestions.
Housekeeper: One week’s pay Dog walker / groomer / pet sitter: One week’s pay Trash attendants: $30 Food or grocery delivery workers: 20% to 25% per order Babysitter: Two days’ pay Nanny / au pair: One to two weeks’ pay Daycare staff: $25 – $75 and a non-cash gift from your child
That probably makes sense. There is a thriving market in private services at low cost.
Well, yes and no. You could make an argument that ear wax removal should be more like dentistry where most people pay for it or go private, but some get free or reduced cost treatment depending on circumstances. But it doesn't seem right that without any particular discussion we've just turned this from an NHS provided treatment to a purely private one, where some people like the one in the article now have a 240 quid a year cost to maintain their hearing. And it definitely doesn't seem right that NICE says this should be a GP provided service but many GPs don't in practice provide it.
Today's PO witness just said he still regards one of the postmasters he investigated as guilty, despite the conviction having being overturned by the court.
Is that the one who seriously overstepped the mark by entering a house and removing jewelry because it was “proceeds of crime”?
He really isn’t doing himself any favours
Do you mean this? He stole jewellery from the SPM's mother even though the SPM was never charged?
Starting to wonder if the ITV drama didn't go far enough!
That probably makes sense. There is a thriving market in private services at low cost.
Well, yes and no. You could make an argument that ear wax removal should be more like dentistry where most people pay for it or go private, but some get free or reduced cost treatment depending on circumstances. But it doesn't seem right that without any particular discussion we've just turned this from an NHS provided treatment to a purely private one, where some people like the one in the article now have a 240 quid a year cost to maintain their hearing. And it definitely doesn't seem right that NICE says this should be a GP provided service but many GPs don't in practice provide it.
Agree. Deafness = major risk factor in social isolation = major risk factor in general decline and dementia.
Edit: not to mention being able to remain economically active.
The problem first arose about twenty years ago when I became suddenly hard of hearing. The GP quickly diagnosed it as wax build up, and for four days I had to apply an oil which I bought from the chemist. This softened the wax and when I returned to the surgery it was removed with a water jet without much difficulty. The improvement in hearing was immediate and spectacular.
This became a routine about every two years. The only real inconvenience was that for a week or so I would be effectively deaf and in a little discomfort until the nurse could wash out the offending obstruction, but it was no big deal. One year the treatment was delayed because the practice couldn't afford the water machine and I had to go elsewhere, but otherwise this biannual event proceded without hitch until I came to Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, where the practice suggested i deal with it myself or go private.
So, I bought a do-it-yourself kit for about a tenner and it worked fine, making me wonder why I hadn't done this years ago. It's a bit awkward, but the big advantage is you don't have to wait until you go deaf before you clean out the wax. That's huge.
You can tell from this little story that I'm not sure it's any great problem that the NHS is no longer providing the de-waxing service. Seems to me that most of us can do-it-ourselves, and for those that can't for some reason, I am sure the local GP can find a solution.
University of York posts £24m deficit (£14m operating deficit) after 16% drop in international student numbers, also blaming England’s “unsustainable funding model”
Basically our university finance system has reached the end of the road
There are issues (the student fees not rising as costs have, for instance). Unis have utility bills too.
However whenever I see a big deficit I like to dig a bit deeper. A few years ago Leeds got into trouble, around the time that they built some stupendous new buildings. Other Unis have had unwise financial activity - at one point Bristol (I think) were borrowing money and then lending it out, but got screwed when the loan rates changed. They even asked staff to voluntarily take some unpaid leave (which was rejected).
Our Uni has put a 'chill' (note - definitely not a freeze) on recruitment. Basically you have to make a really watertight case. I suspect retiring staff will be a lot harder to replace for a while.
Some of the expansion is quite startling. Southampton, the town, is dying. Southampton, the university, is swallowing the place wholesale.
Yes, and a lot of it financed a while ago on low interest rates that may have changed. Certainly the cap on Uni fees needs looking at, especially for STEM with the associated lab costs etc.
Solution - lift the cap, but allow any uni (not just the Russell Group) to recruit as many as students as they like.
Or alternatively, we retain the cap, possibly at a higher rate, but put an end to the ridiculous snobbery that the Russell Group is somehow 'better' because reasons (which are nothing to do with most of our political leaders having gone there because they went to particular schools and having no point of comparison to other unis to see whether they're better or worse).
Either we have a market in HE, or we don't.
Lift the cap, but don’t let government backstop student loans.
Fees need to be agreed between each uni, their applicants, and the banks lending the money at their own risk.
STEM subjects good, Mickey Mouse Studies not so much.
People need to lose this snobbery about the Arts and Humanities. Look at the Post Office scandal: it took a well written work of drama, an artistic creation, to give the story the profile it needed. And as a country these creative industries are ones we are actually quite good at, our successes there help us to pay our way in the world. We need an upgrading of skills across the board, not a singular focus on STEM subjects, useful as they are.
One of the FTSE250 companies grew thanks to the creative efforts of a number of Humanities graduates, and now generates substantial export earnings.
Britain probably doesn't have enough STEM graduates, but it needs Humanities graduates too.
From my experience anti-English hatred is endemic everywhere in Wales.
How a Welsh town became a hotbed of anti-English hatred
A poison pen letter sent to an Aberystwyth resident reveals a potentially ‘toxic’ attitude towards the English as second homes proliferate
Located in a leafy suburb less than a mile from the sea, Iorwerth Avenue in Aberystwyth is understandably a sought-after place to live.
Its residents are a mix of lawyers and councillors, both Welsh and English, and the general consensus is that most people know each other and get along well. Yet recently, that has changed.
A well-known and “popular” resident hailing from the Midlands received a poison pen letter, accusing him of being “low-life” and urging him to go back to “Brummyland”.
“Located in a leafy suburb less than a mile from the sea, Iorwerth Avenue in Aberystwyth is understandably a sought-after place to live.”
Why? Aber is a nice place to live if you are not a thrill seeking, desperate to travel, hates the UK winter type.
It’s the use of the word “understandably”
As if everyone in the world KNOWS that somewhere a mile out of central Aberystwyth must be up there with St Trop and Mayfair and the Upper East Side and the best bits of Dubai in terms of desirability
It's 400 yards to Great Darkgate Street. You're confusing it with the 'within a mile of the sea' bit.
Lee Anderson says he ‘should have voted’ for Rwanda Bill – and he wants his old job back
Former deputy Tory chairman insists there is ‘no chance’ of Rishi Sunak being deposed before election and Conservative MPs should back him
Lee Anderson has said he should have voted for the Rwanda Bill and would take back his old job as deputy Tory chairman if asked by Rishi Sunak.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the outspoken MP said he should have been “brave” and sided with the Government instead of abstaining in last week’s crunch vote on the latest iteration of the migrant deportation plan.
He also said there is “no chance” of Mr Sunak being deposed before the next election and revealed he would back Donald Trump “by default” if he lived in the US, as he could never vote for Joe Biden.
Mr Anderson resigned as deputy party chairman on Jan 16 in order to support amendments aimed at toughening up Mr Sunak’s proposals to get Rwanda flights off the ground, before refusing to back the Bill itself.
I do not buy people saying they favour Trump because Biden is such a grim or scary proposition. The guy is knocking on, sure, and his health would be a standing concern in a 2nd term, but in his 1st term he's been an able competent president who has sought to govern by consensus. No way does he represent something so terrible as to drive someone into supporting Donald Trump. It's a crock of shit when anyone says that. They are lying.
On my last road trip I was surprised at the depth of hatred for 'Washington' once you got away from the big cities. To the extent that people would tell you (quite passionately) not to go there because it was such a horrible place. Like it or not, Trump and the alt-right have been more successful in tapping into this disaffection than the Dems who, despite their policy agenda being more favourable for poorer working Americans, are seen as exemplifying much about their politics that many ordinary Americans dislike. Biden's a nicer guy, for sure, but he's also a Washington insider through and through.
But where does the hatred come from? Is it part of the American psyche to distrust government? Does it reflect a very large country, so the political “centre” always feels remote? Or is right-wing media constantly lying, scapegoating ‘Washington’ for the ills of deindustrialisation and the actions of big business?
What did all that disaffection get people in Trump’s first term? A ballooning deficit, tax cuts for the rich and a Supreme Court in hock to plutocrats.
The funny thing is that Washington DC (the place rather than the concept) is actually a nice place and almost certainly a much nicer place than the places where the people telling you not to go to Washington live. Especially the bits that anyone actually visiting Washington would go to.
I remember Andrew Sullivan (who lives there) describing how awful the climate is in winter and summer.
I disagree actually. The winter is colder than in London but a lot shorter. Summer is hot and sultry but I don't mind a bit of heat. And the rest of the year is absolutely gorgeous. And much lighter than the UK as it's so much further south.
DC is phenomenally ugly, apart from the few bits that look like an English Georgian town, like, er, Georgetown
And it is insanely humid in high summer
And somewhere like Tennessee, where they moan about DC, is generally nicer than DC
Prosperous rural Tennessee can be positively Edenic; I believe it has pockets that are amongst the wealthiest in the USA
We'll have to agree to disagree about it I'm afraid, and what do I know, I only lived there for five years. Most of the city bears a closer resemblance to Georgetown than to the big neoclassical slabs in the centre. Most is 19C Victorian red brick, low rise, with shady tree lined streets. It's not that humid in summer unless you've only ever lived in Northern Europe. Tennessee is hotter than DC. I had a holiday in Eastern Tennessee, the scenery was beautiful and Dollywood was fun but it didn't seem like it was in great shape, it was mostly run down strip malls and an incredibly large number of churches. It didn't strike me as a great place to live unless you really liked going to church and Dunkin Donuts.
Fair enough. You have more experience of DC than me, but then I have seen a lot more of the world than you, so it’s probably a wash
I think part of my disappointment was coz DC - up to that point - was the last, most famous city on earth that I had NOT seen, along with Rio (still haven’t seen Rio). And it looms so large in everyone’s mental map. The White House. The Capitol. The Mall
And then you get there and the White House is this tiny pleasant quasi-Georgian white building surrounded by wire and guards and bristling guns and the Capitol is a faintly ludicrous white boob and the other memorials - Washington Monument, Lincoln, Vietnam, etc - are laughably bombastic, indeed vulgar. More Nicolae Ceaucescu than Louis Quatorze. And when it is not bombastic, central DC is simply hideous - massive 70s and 80s and 90s slabs of steroidal dreck
@SeaShantyIrish2 gave a good explanation for this when i was moaning about it during my visit. There is a height limit in DC so the government buildings have to maximise their floor space beneath that, so they all look small yet simultaneously overblown and stuffed - like a midget who has been to the gym 24/7/365
i accept the burbs must be much nicer
You’ve been to the wrong bits of Tennessee! It can be absurdly lovely AND rich. Eg Williamson County
“Research ranked Williamson County as America's wealthiest county (1st) when the local cost of living was factored into the equation with median household income.[21]”
I agree the White House is very underwhelming. Other famous sights like the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial don't disappoint, IMHO. It's the inner suburbs I really like though, places like Capitol Hill and Colombia Heights. I don't want to be too down on Eastern Tennessee, every part of it that was untouched by human hand was beautiful.
We have a lovely friendly postman. He spends as much time petting our dog and giving him treats as he does delivering our mail and also brings us genera news from town (flooded roads, that sort of thing). We have no postbox so the mail gets delivered randomly to any number of places - the front hall if the door is open, the garage (ditto), the wood store, the garden store and on occasion the greenhouse.
We tend to forget about these other places so are often picking up rather damp mail days or weeks after it was delivered.
Anyway this morning Mr Postie delivered this.
Both Husband and I wondered out loud why the BNP was sending out election leaflets. But no - it's from the Labour candidate.
It makes absolutely no mention of our area at all. At least the local Tory MP bothered to make his leaflet focused on this area. Labour will certainly win and once again this part of the constituency will be ignored as it was when Labour last held it. I can quite understand why people here voted for Levelling Up - and why they will now vote against those who failed to deliver it. But they won't get it or anything remotely like it from Labour to judge by how they behaved when they last held this seat and others like it.
Comments
Sir Frank Whittle, perhaps?
An interesting point is how few are post war. The only recent well-known-ish projects I can think of that have had some attention (excluding military who are kept quiet) would perhaps be Thrust-II, Hotol and their successors.
R101, now...
But it is absolutely terribe for the SPD. I would be surprised if the SPD has ever* been lower than 15% for a Bundestag poll. Historically 25% has been considered very bad.
Obviously taking "ever" to mean since 1949 and not including the end of 2023 as that counts as now.
Funnily enough, on the ship home I met someone who worked in government at Washington (some kind of middle to senior official, I think) and I happened to mention that everywhere I went, ordinary Americans had seemed very hostile towards Washington - and, to my surprise, she completely lost it, started shouting at me things like "where do these people think their services come from?" and "who is it that keeps them safe?" and there was no more discussion to be had - I just had to flee at the first opportunity. She seemed at least as angry as the most agitated of those who'd told me not to go there!
It's obvious that Gordon was responsible for R101 crashing. It was a government project, built with a weird hybrid financing model.
Something for Conservatives to hold onto given the still challenging global economic difficulties
It’s a weird field, as not very many people become famous outside of the field.
We could also add Ross Brawn, James Allison, and a few more of the F1 boys and girls who studied aeronautics.
"In fairness, the Democrats have helped to facilitate the Trump narrative — and therefore his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. His political rise should have initiated a genuine soul-searching among a humiliated establishment. But rather than consider their failures toward the American people, who continue to turn to a carnival barker for relief, the policymaking elite have concluded that it is they who have been failed — by the people. The result, as we are starting to see, is the exacerbation of America’s prevailing divisions. In this, New Hampshire serves as both a symptom and an inflammatory — not for a civil war between North and South, but a clash within each city and state."
He really isn’t doing himself any favours
However we don't
"...Willy Messerschmitt? More like Won't-y Messerschmitt, if you ask me. Dirty Fokker, that's all I can say. Are you alright, missus? They can't touch you for it..."
I lived in Washington DC for five years, on Capitol Hill just a few blocks from the Capitol building. It was a really idyllic place. I even attended the Obama inauguration. Lovely light, beautiful warm springs and autumns, short winters, and while a lot of people complained about the summer heat I quite liked it. Loads of great restaurants and bars. Attractive tree-lined streets. Good public transport by US standards. It really is a great city, part of me wishes we were still there although London will always be my #1.
Thankfully there are no prospective student interviews at German Unis
Off the top of my head.
"Best UK Delivery Companies | Sendcloud" https://www.sendcloud.co.uk/top-uk-delivery-companies/
Starting to wonder if the ITV drama didn't go far enough!
https://twitter.com/AlanRamsay10/status/1749531312875053203?t=Z_LdPm-alVwGuHOujcXNMQ&s=19
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Yf5B6GbYk
The Texas National Guard, directed by Gov Abbott, have been installing razor wire to try and stop immigrants crossing the river that marks the border. The Federal Border Patrol, under the direction of Biden, have been removing it, stating their primary jurisdiction over the border. So far, the Supreme Court has sided with the Feds, but Abbott isn’t backing down.
https://thepostmillennial.com/texas-installs-more-razor-wire-on-eagle-pass-border-after-supreme-court-said-biden-could-remove-it
More to the point, doesn't that only apply to items purchased after the alleged crime has occurred?
I'm struggling to see how those two including Mr I Was Very Busy So Couldn't Do A Proper Statement aren't doing time for theft.
He basically founded the science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_von_Kármán
One of the "Martians".
(edit)
Blimey, Wikipedia has a list of them.
You'll recognise a lot more than you might think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aerospace_engineers
And it is insanely humid in high summer
And somewhere like Tennessee, where they moan about DC, is generally nicer than DC
Prosperous rural Tennessee can be positively Edenic; I believe it has pockets that are amongst the wealthiest in the USA
And then adding, 'I wonder why I was thinking of Fokkers when planning this assembly' and looking innocently at the Head.
You may well see a flaw in this system. Research (mostly) loses universities money and has to be subsidised by other activity. Teaching home undergraduates is probably done at a loss now. The main thing that turns a good profit margin is overseas students, particularly postgraduate.
I visited a few years back (in June). Could be the best city I've ever visited.
You see the same in schools, actually. Last year maybe 40% of my income came from China. This year, maybe 2%.
That is partly because of the amount I'm earning elsewhere, but numbers of Chinese students have dropped right off.
If government wants to subsidise useful degrees (medicine, nursing, engineering etc) then do it directly.
But it’s not a good look and I suspect drives from an unwilliness to accept that he himself did things that were at best dubious and in reality downright illegal
A handful of the hundreds of prosecuted SPMs may in fact be guilty of stealing but we will never know - and where money did actually disappear, rather than it being a figment of Horizon's imagination, how do we know it was the SPM that took it rather than one of his/her staff?
All convictions are unsafe where the money trail was not established - all must be overturned.
They are known as Gordian Nots.
Times have sure changed.
And if university interviews were abolished, matching students to courses could be done by a moderately powered computer *after* A-level results are published.
If that is so, all the convictions are unsafe. No doubt this would include where there was indeed some genuine dishonesty, although common sense would suggest the number of such cases and amounts involved would be small.
14-17% is exactly where the SPD was in the polls for most of the last parliament btw. Except for the last few weeks before the election.
Sopwith, Hawker, Freddie Handley Page, etc.
Howard Hughes.
Junkers, Fokker.
Tennessee is hotter than DC. I had a holiday in Eastern Tennessee, the scenery was beautiful and Dollywood was fun but it didn't seem like it was in great shape, it was mostly run down strip malls and an incredibly large number of churches. It didn't strike me as a great place to live unless you really liked going to church and Dunkin Donuts.
Royal Mail would be my second last choice after Evri.
I think part of my disappointment was coz DC - up to that point - was the last, most famous city on earth that I had NOT seen, along with Rio (still haven’t seen Rio). And it looms so large in everyone’s mental map. The White House. The Capitol. The Mall
And then you get there and the White House is this tiny pleasant quasi-Georgian white building surrounded by wire and guards and bristling guns and the Capitol is a faintly ludicrous white boob and the other memorials - Washington Monument, Lincoln, Vietnam, etc - are laughably bombastic, indeed vulgar. More Nicolae Ceaucescu than Louis Quatorze. And when it is not bombastic, central DC is simply hideous - massive 70s and 80s and 90s slabs of steroidal dreck
@SeaShantyIrish2 gave a good explanation for this when i was moaning about it during my visit. There is a height limit in DC so the government buildings have to maximise their floor space beneath that, so they all look small yet simultaneously overblown and stuffed - like a midget who has been to the gym 24/7/365
i accept the burbs must be much nicer
You’ve been to the wrong bits of Tennessee! It can be absurdly lovely AND rich. Eg Williamson County
“Research ranked Williamson County as America's wealthiest county (1st) when the local cost of living was factored into the equation with median household income.[21]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamson_County,_Tennessee
How a Welsh town became a hotbed of anti-English hatred
A poison pen letter sent to an Aberystwyth resident reveals a potentially ‘toxic’ attitude towards the English as second homes proliferate
Located in a leafy suburb less than a mile from the sea, Iorwerth Avenue in Aberystwyth is understandably a sought-after place to live.
Its residents are a mix of lawyers and councillors, both Welsh and English, and the general consensus is that most people know each other and get along well. Yet recently, that has changed.
A well-known and “popular” resident hailing from the Midlands received a poison pen letter, accusing him of being “low-life” and urging him to go back to “Brummyland”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/24/welsh-nationalism-housing-crisis-labour-aberystwyth/?li_source=LI&li_medium=for_you
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-68071665
I would put the National Gallery of Art and the Space/Flight museum in my global top ten. They are that good
“Located in a leafy suburb less than a mile from the sea, Iorwerth Avenue in Aberystwyth is understandably a sought-after place to live.”
What precisely are the 'failures of the
establishment' ?
And in what way are they 'blaming the people' ?
I blame Trump, myself. The GOP establishment, I suppose, has largely surrendered to him.
This article, arguably, comes closer to some sort of explanation.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/22/new-hampshire-primary-voter-00136850
As if everyone in the world KNOWS that somewhere a mile out of central Aberystwyth must be up there with St Trop and Mayfair and the Upper East Side and the best bits of Dubai in terms of desirability
NEW THREAD
My area no longer offers it on the NHS.
And £50-£60 is low cost for most perhaps, but not for lots of people, and has to be added to optical/glasses charges, dental charges and so on.
It seems to me the overwhelming majority of quotidian medical issues are quite ordinary, unglamorous and not especially expensive. These are the things we should stick to, while being more cautious about treatments that cost millions.
I was just googling the Upper East Side (I am slightly bored) and I found a site dedicated to US travel and it has advice for how much you should tip if you go on holiday to NYC or spend some time there
This is just one chunk
How Much to Tip Non-Building Workers for the Holidays
Not sure who else to tip, aside from your building workers? While this will differ based on what services you utilize, here’s a list of workers and service providers that are vital to New Yorkers, along with holiday tipping suggestions.
Housekeeper: One week’s pay
Dog walker / groomer / pet sitter: One week’s pay
Trash attendants: $30
Food or grocery delivery workers: 20% to 25% per order
Babysitter: Two days’ pay
Nanny / au pair: One to two weeks’ pay
Daycare staff: $25 – $75 and a non-cash gift from your child
WTAFFFFF
Edit: not to mention being able to remain economically active.
The problem first arose about twenty years ago when I became suddenly hard of hearing. The GP quickly diagnosed it as wax build up, and for four days I had to apply an oil which I bought from the chemist. This softened the wax and when I returned to the surgery it was removed with a water jet without much difficulty. The improvement in hearing was immediate and spectacular.
This became a routine about every two years. The only real inconvenience was that for a week or so I would be effectively deaf and in a little discomfort until the nurse could wash out the offending obstruction, but it was no big deal. One year the treatment was delayed because the practice couldn't afford the water machine and I had to go elsewhere, but otherwise this biannual event proceded without hitch until I came to Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, where the practice suggested i deal with it myself or go private.
So, I bought a do-it-yourself kit for about a tenner and it worked fine, making me wonder why I hadn't done this years ago. It's a bit awkward, but the big advantage is you don't have to wait until you go deaf before you clean out the wax. That's huge.
You can tell from this little story that I'm not sure it's any great problem that the NHS is no longer providing the de-waxing service. Seems to me that most of us can do-it-ourselves, and for those that can't for some reason, I am sure the local GP can find a solution.
Or am I missing something?
Britain probably doesn't have enough STEM graduates, but it needs Humanities graduates too.
I don't want to be too down on Eastern Tennessee, every part of it that was untouched by human hand was beautiful.
We tend to forget about these other places so are often picking up rather damp mail days or weeks after it was delivered.
Anyway this morning Mr Postie delivered this.
Both Husband and I wondered out loud why the BNP was sending out election leaflets. But no - it's from the Labour candidate.
It makes absolutely no mention of our area at all. At least the local Tory MP bothered to make his leaflet focused on this area. Labour will certainly win and once again this part of the constituency will be ignored as it was when Labour last held it. I can quite understand why people here voted for Levelling Up - and why they will now vote against those who failed to deliver it. But they won't get it or anything remotely like it from Labour to judge by how they behaved when they last held this seat and others like it.