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PB Predictions Competition 2024 – Reminder – politicalbetting.com

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  • Options
    edmundintokyoedmundintokyo Posts: 17,151
    Polymarket market on SCOTUS on the Colorado ballot access decision:

    https://polymarket.com/event/will-us-supreme-court-vote-to-reinstate-trump-on-colorados-2024-ballot?tid=1704533617165

    Currently showing a 18%-20% chance that they'll let the Colorado decision stand. I guess there are possible wording quibbles since these markets aren't created by professionals but even so 20% seems like a lot?
  • Options
    The Loughborough MP Jane Hunt has popped up on social media to promote a go fund me page for her flooded local pub in affluent Quorn. Barely a sympathetic word for her constituents in the council estates and terraced homes in the Belton Road/Meadow Lane area of Loughborough. The Labour councillors and candidate have been out and about touring the areas and talking to people.
    This is a proper disaster for the town, we got off lightly with a couple of inches of vile smelling mud covering our patio and in the garage, while many people have lost everything in downstairs rooms and face months in temporary accommodation and a significant number don't appear to be insured.
    Hunt is the face of the government in the area. They appear to have given up.
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,420

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
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    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 39,057

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    More problems for Boeing:

    https://twitter.com/petemuntean/status/1743487804133253264

    An exit 'door' blew out in flight at 16,000 feet; there were no fatalities. The plane was only ten weeks old.

    "On the 737-9 MAX, Boeing includes a rear cabin exit door aft of the wings, but before the rear exit door. This is activated in dense seating configurations to meet evacuation requirements. The doors are not activated on Alaska Airlines aircraft and are permanently “plugged."

    https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/alaska-airlines-737-9-max-exit-door-separates-in-flight/

    So they lost a door that was not even supposed to be a door on that aircraft; just a plug in the fuselage.

    Whoops. An actual door would have been less likely to come out.

    Meanwhile, it’s not just the doors, but nacelles as well. The anti-icing heaters can potentially cause overheating and breakup of the structure if left on by accident.
    https://www.gmtoday.com/business/boeing-wants-faa-to-exempt-max-7-from-safety-rules-to-get-it-in-the/article_060478ca-ac0c-11ee-b0fa-7fe6fbf1124d.html
    Surely an actual door would have been *more* likely to come out? Doors are things designed to open, and failure of locking mechanisms can always occur. This is a plug in a gap in the fuselage that is *never* supposed to open: you could - should, in fact - put connectors on it that are much more reliable than that of doors.

    I'd expect all 737 Max's of this configuration to be grounded. As it was only ten weeks old, it'll be a manufacturing error, and they'll need to work out why it happened, inspections, and how to prevent it happening again, before they fly again.

    I'm betting they don't, though.
    An actual door has a number of large steel pins which keep it in place. The plug is either riveted or more likely glued into the hole, without all the heavy engineering that goes into the door. Dropping the door for a plug is purely to save weight.

    Yes, it’s either a design or manufacturing problem, either of which will ground them all until they’ve worked out the issue.

    Another reminder to always wear your seat belt when you can, as if the hundreds of passenger injuries every year caused by turbulence weren’t enough reason.
    No. Doors are designed to be opened, and therefore are always a weak point of the structure. There is zero reason for a plug like that to be any weaker than the rest of the plane's structure - at least, no valid reason.
    The door *opening* is the weak point in the *fusleage* design, present whether or not there’s an actual door there.

    Imagine that you replaced a steel door in your house with a non-standard cardboard door; on a windy day that cardboard door is now the weak point, whereas the steel door would be an over-engineered but heavy solution that would stay standing in its frame, as the wood and brick wall disintegrated around it.

    Boeing has inadvertently replaced a steel door with a cardboard door, or at least a door with a cardboard frame.
    If you choose to replace that door with a cardboard one, that is. There is zero reason for the plug to be less strong than a normal door: in fact, it should be stronger.

    As for weight: you also need to exclude the weight of the opening and securing mechanisms and escape chute, as it isn't an overwing door.
    Oh, of course it’s possible to design a door plug that is both stronger than the door and considerably lighter.

    It’s just that Boeing haven’t done that. They’ve either designed or manufactured a plug that’s the weakest point of the entire pressurised structure.
    If the stuff I’ve found online is correct, the plug is actually the external part of the regular emergency exit door, with the latching system bolted closed and the opening mechanism removed. Inside the aircraft, it’s just a regular interior panel - no sign of a door.
    I saw something similar on PPrune: it makes sense in a way, as it makes it easier to convert the plane to a high-density configuration if the purchasing airline sells it on to an airline that wants that configuration.

    But I would expect additional fixings to just the normal locking bolts: I assume the hinges are also present in the 'fixed' door. If not, that'd certainly weaken it...

    I wonder how long it will take them to find the door...
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,740
    Pagan2 said:

    PB PREDICTIONS COMPETITION 2024

    1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 13%

    2. Date of the next UK General Election. = 6th June

    3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Same as current leaders

    4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%).= Lab + majority 7.5% - NOM

    5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Trump > Biden

    6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. =Biden

    7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 4.7%

    8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). = 3.7%

    9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £170 billion

    10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 28

    @Pagan2, I have PMed you a query.
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    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,734

    If the Labour opinion poll lead is under 10 points by the end of Q1 that speaks of Big Mo for the Tories. Surely Sunak would then be thinking early for the GE, not late.

    On another point, is the American Revolution really the country’s first civil war?

    Very much so, Allen makes the case in this book:

    Tories: Fighting for the King in America's First Civil War https://amzn.eu/d/axGLIMM

    I read it some years ago and it clearly was a pretty brutal insurgency and counter-insurgency with plenty of atrocities on both sides.

    The American Parriots won in the same way that other insurgents did. They lost plenty of battles, indeed most of them, but managed to keep an army in the field (hence the significance of Valley Forge) and gradually make control of outlying areas untenable for Loyalists, and civil administration by the British impossible. Ultimately the intervention of a foreign power for its own geopolitical reasons was decisive.

    The British forces could neither devise a military or political strategy to win over a population with plenty of sympathisers and neutrals. 250 years later this remains an issue in counter insurgencies, see the Taliban in Afghanistan for a recent example.

  • Options
    StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 14,529

    Carnyx said:

    Eabhal said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Foxy said:

    2 more ships going due to problems finding sailors:

    https://twitter.com/larisamlbrown/status/1743373293929828667?t=JkxqV_O0B_Erj2eahIFXUw&s=19

    In large part due to bodged privatisation of recruitment. There are plenty of enquires it seems, just an inability to turn them into sailors.

    https://navylookout.com/royal-navy-failing-to-get-enough-recruits-into-basic-training/

    Mothballing Albion and Bulwark actually makes quite a lot of sense in the context of the ongoing slow motion catastrophe. The UK is never going to do an amphibious assault as, much like an airborne assault, it's one of those operations where everybody dies if it goes wrong. It's too politically risky in this age of TikTok and Sky News. Imagine Shappsie fronting up to Kay Burleigh saying 800 booties are brown bread and she pulls that incredulous face that is 40% veneers, 40% botox and 20% hairspray. Better to put what we crew have on the T23s/T45s/CSG.

    The T45 fleet is in particularly shit order at the moment: 2 broken, 3 in refit, 1 working.
    I would guess that the inability of the Royal Navy to protect the UK's gas imports from Qatar might be slightly more important than the granting of a few licenses in the North Sea.
    On which, I noticed this the other day, sneaked out during the darts:

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/04/uk-government-admits-rosebank-oil-will-not-be-kept-in-uk-to-boost-energy-security

    'The UK government has admitted that oil from the controversial Rosebank field will be sold on the international market rather than to UK consumers.

    Ministers have repeatedly claimed developing the huge oilfield off Shetland will improve UK energy security and help UK consumers, overriding concerns from climate experts and their own advisers.

    In a written answer to a parliamentary question, however, the government appears to accept that the private companies extracting the oil will sell the vast majority internationally, saying: “It is not desirable to force private companies to ‘allocate’ oil and gas produced in the North Sea for domestic use”.'
    Be interesting to see what Labour says on this. I expect it will be silence.
    If your opponent is doing something dumb, that's usually the best tactic.

    First thing to remember is that the amounts of oil and gas were talking about are in the "sounds like more than they really are". See this from Sky News;

    https://news.sky.com/story/why-the-debate-over-north-sea-oil-and-gas-is-a-storm-in-a-teacup-12931351

    Next thing is that this all came out of the post-Uxbridge "gurn at the greens" thing. It was designed to embarrass Labour, and has caused more political harm to the Conservatives. Couldn't happen to nicer people.
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,740

    Pagan2 said:

    PB PREDICTIONS COMPETITION 2024

    1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 13%

    2. Date of the next UK General Election. = 6th June

    3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Same as current leaders

    4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%).= Lab + majority 7.5% - NOM

    5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Trump > Biden

    6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. =Biden

    7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 4.7%

    8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). = 3.7%

    9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £170 billion

    10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 28

    @Pagan2, I have PMed you a query.
    I also have outstanding PM queries with @TheKitchenCabinet and @OccasionalOptimist.

    (Just to note, I have PMed a few posters where I think their entries might be ambiguous, in order to clarify and make the eventual scoring simpler; these are the only ones outstanding.)
  • Options
    Pagan2Pagan2 Posts: 8,846

    Pagan2 said:

    PB PREDICTIONS COMPETITION 2024

    1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 13%

    2. Date of the next UK General Election. = 6th June

    3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Same as current leaders

    4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%).= Lab + majority 7.5% - NOM

    5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Trump > Biden

    6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. =Biden

    7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 4.7%

    8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). = 3.7%

    9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £170 billion

    10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 28

    @Pagan2, I have PMed you a query.
    replied hope it clarifies
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    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,740
    Barnesian said:

    Nigelb said:

    Barnesian said:

    Although I have predicted Penny Mordaunt as Tory leader at end 2024...

    Haven't you just predicted her as leader before a general election this May ? (Which seems brave.)

    Of did I misunderstand your entry ?
    You are right. I misread the question. I meant at end 2024. Oh well.
    Good to have some diversity! ;-)
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    DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 24,475
    What’s happening in UK employment law in 2024?
    https://www.lewissilkin.com/en/insights/whats-happening-in-uk-employment-law-in-2024

    That name looks familiar and the history page confirms it was indeed the family firm of the legal Labour MPs.
    https://www.lewissilkin.com/en/about-us/history
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,740
    Pagan2 said:

    Pagan2 said:

    PB PREDICTIONS COMPETITION 2024

    1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 13%

    2. Date of the next UK General Election. = 6th June

    3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Same as current leaders

    4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%).= Lab + majority 7.5% - NOM

    5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Trump > Biden

    6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. =Biden

    7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 4.7%

    8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). = 3.7%

    9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £170 billion

    10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 28

    @Pagan2, I have PMed you a query.
    replied hope it clarifies
    Perfect, thanks.
  • Options
    Andy_CookeAndy_Cooke Posts: 4,818

    Polymarket market on SCOTUS on the Colorado ballot access decision:

    https://polymarket.com/event/will-us-supreme-court-vote-to-reinstate-trump-on-colorados-2024-ballot?tid=1704533617165

    Currently showing a 18%-20% chance that they'll let the Colorado decision stand. I guess there are possible wording quibbles since these markets aren't created by professionals but even so 20% seems like a lot?

    My instinct was "no way", but then - the judges don't need to run for reelection. Getting Trump off the board might look to them to be best for the Republicans and conservative side. And as for gratitude to Trump... the adage of "buy a dog" springs to mind.

    And there's also the outside freak chance they might judge it on its merits, but that'd be mad.
  • Options
    DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 24,475

    Barnesian said:

    2. Date of the next UK General Election. = 9th May

    A fascinating idea. Allows Tory councillors to campaign to try and save the government. Then when they get demolished we have one final week where the right wing media desperately pump out 7 days of SAVE BRITAIN diatribe. Would a Zionev letter do the job? Perhaps one purporting to show how the evil Keith Donkey helped cover up Saville? A forgery of course, but something the Heil and GBeebies can try to make into *the* election issue?
    The real fake dirt will be on social media, one imagines.
  • Options
    Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,875
    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Biden starts badly. The French were arguably more powerful than the British and they were on the American side.

    Edit - to be fair though, the rest so far is very good.

    Also worth noting how fluent it is, despite the claims of Trump.

    This was a few years after we had pretty comprehensively defeated the French worldwide in the Severn years war, notably in Canada and India, so I think it fair to say that the British Empire was the most powerful in the world in 1777, the defeat at Saratoga not withstanding.

    But facts aside, the winter at Valley Forge is part of the foundation myths of the USA. Its not about historical accuracy, it is about invoking the Founding Fathers of America..

    The French decision to back (and fund to ruinous extent), the American rebels was an own goal on a par with the governor of Otrar deciding to torture Genghis Khan’s envoys to death for shit and giggles.
  • Options
    algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,593
    edited January 6
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
  • Options
    PoulterPoulter Posts: 62
    edited January 6
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    You're deluding yourself if you believe that the assumptions that the whole notion of "IQ" rests on are anything other than dimwitted Nazi sh*t. There's no such thing as "general intelligence" (as any woman will be able to tell you), any more than it makes sense to work with an average of voltage, height, and smelliness.

    The whole crock of dimwitted "IQ" evil is so about both class and race.

    Oh look - Lewis "Eugenics" Terman's son founded Silicon Valley.
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,734
    edited January 6

    The Loughborough MP Jane Hunt has popped up on social media to promote a go fund me page for her flooded local pub in affluent Quorn. Barely a sympathetic word for her constituents in the council estates and terraced homes in the Belton Road/Meadow Lane area of Loughborough. The Labour councillors and candidate have been out and about touring the areas and talking to people.
    This is a proper disaster for the town, we got off lightly with a couple of inches of vile smelling mud covering our patio and in the garage, while many people have lost everything in downstairs rooms and face months in temporary accommodation and a significant number don't appear to be insured.
    Hunt is the face of the government in the area. They appear to have given up.

    With the ground so saturated and the Soar/Trent so slow moving it looks like it will be a long time to drain. Sounds as if you got off relatively lightly but it's a terrible mess. Best wishes.
  • Options
    algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,593
    edited January 6
    edit
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,734
    Sean_F said:

    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Biden starts badly. The French were arguably more powerful than the British and they were on the American side.

    Edit - to be fair though, the rest so far is very good.

    Also worth noting how fluent it is, despite the claims of Trump.

    This was a few years after we had pretty comprehensively defeated the French worldwide in the Severn years war, notably in Canada and India, so I think it fair to say that the British Empire was the most powerful in the world in 1777, the defeat at Saratoga not withstanding.

    But facts aside, the winter at Valley Forge is part of the foundation myths of the USA. Its not about historical accuracy, it is about invoking the Founding Fathers of America..

    The French decision to back (and fund to ruinous extent), the American rebels was an own goal on a par with the governor of Otrar deciding to torture Genghis Khan’s envoys to death for shit and giggles.
    Or more recently, Regean and Thatcher funding the Taliban.
  • Options
    Peter_the_PunterPeter_the_Punter Posts: 13,325
    Dura_Ace said:

    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    2 more ships going due to problems finding sailors:

    https://twitter.com/larisamlbrown/status/1743373293929828667?t=JkxqV_O0B_Erj2eahIFXUw&s=19

    In large part due to bodged privatisation of recruitment. There are plenty of enquires it seems, just an inability to turn them into sailors.

    https://navylookout.com/royal-navy-failing-to-get-enough-recruits-into-basic-training/

    I know an ex-brigadier from the army who is exasperated about this.

    They used to use semi-retired and invalided ex-service personnel to do this, and they did it well - holding the hands of recruits from start to finish.
    Also people who could be believed when they told you about what life was like in the forces and could answer questions about it. Not some rando from Big Contractor plc.
    When I joined (the RN Dragon Rider Corps in the Napoleonic Wars) I dealt only with active duty RN from the moment I stepped inside the recruitment office. The sole civvie was an ex RN Chirurgeon/GP, who did my medical and asked thinly veiled questions designed to screen out LGTBQ+ types.
    Why on earth would they be bothered by LGTBQ types?

    What ever happened to rum, bum and concertina?
  • Options
    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,508

    PB PREDICTIONS COMPETITION 2024

    1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 13

    2. Date of the next UK General Election. = November 14th 2024

    3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Same as current leaders

    4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%).= Lab + majority 10.5% - 31

    5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Trump > Biden

    6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. = Biden (v. narrowly

    7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 3.4%

    8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). = 2.9%

    9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £125 billion

    10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 59

    I don't have insight on these and I've decided most of my predictions wouldn't be worth it, so I haven't done it. That said, all the Olympic predictions are for our medal tally to decrease, and I wonder if this is British pessimism. I know the woke brigade is doing its best to undermine our rowing etc., but I think we should stand a good chance in Paris. It's very close geographically, with very similar competing conditions, and that should advantage our athletes and horses. Sadly Ukraine will be sending less competitors I guess, Russia I doubt they've sent any of their Olympic team to Ukraine, but they might not have a great year either. I am not a great sport follower it must be said, so perhaps the predictors in the 50s have better reasons than I've given.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908
    edited January 6
    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


  • Options
    Peter_the_PunterPeter_the_Punter Posts: 13,325
    Foxy said:

    Barnesian said:

    Nigelb said:

    Barnesian said:

    Although I have predicted Penny Mordaunt as Tory leader at end 2024...

    Haven't you just predicted her as leader before a general election this May ? (Which seems brave.)

    Of did I misunderstand your entry ?
    You are right. I misread the question. I meant at end 2024. Oh well.
    Predicting who is leader at the end of 2024 for all parties is an interesting game, though perhaps mid 2025 is fairer to allow time for leadership contests.

    So by Conference season 2025 I expect the following:

    Labour: Starmer

    Conservative: Badenoch

    Liberal Democrats: Cooper

    SNP: Yousef

    Reform: Tice

    Green: Denyer/Ramsey

    Foxy, please note that Badenoch is currently the Minister pretending to be in charge of the Post Office.

    This is not a career-enhancing role.
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,420
    Poulter said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    You're deluding yourself if you believe that the assumptions that the whole notion of "IQ" rests on are anything other than dimwitted Nazi sh*t. There's no such thing as "general intelligence" (as any woman will be able to tell you), any more than it makes sense to work with an average of voltage, height, and smelliness.

    The whole crock of dimwitted "IQ" evil is so about both class and race.

    Oh look - Lewis "Eugenics" Terman's son founded Silicon Valley.
    lol

    Why would “a woman” be able to tell me things about intelligence that a man cannot? Is that because women are innately more insightful, or empathetic, or gifted with a higher IQ?
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,518

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    I was involved for a while with https://london.hackspace.org.uk/

    A communal workshop where students and people in frustrating, dead end white collar jobs could turn metal and wood into noise.

    Because they are frustrated by not actually doing things they want to do, in courses or jobs.

    The irony is trying to maintain the class division of work - success is clean hands - in an age when many high paid jobs require a mix.
  • Options
    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,508

    Foxy said:

    Barnesian said:

    Nigelb said:

    Barnesian said:

    Although I have predicted Penny Mordaunt as Tory leader at end 2024...

    Haven't you just predicted her as leader before a general election this May ? (Which seems brave.)

    Of did I misunderstand your entry ?
    You are right. I misread the question. I meant at end 2024. Oh well.
    Predicting who is leader at the end of 2024 for all parties is an interesting game, though perhaps mid 2025 is fairer to allow time for leadership contests.

    So by Conference season 2025 I expect the following:

    Labour: Starmer

    Conservative: Badenoch

    Liberal Democrats: Cooper

    SNP: Yousef

    Reform: Tice

    Green: Denyer/Ramsey

    Foxy, please note that Badenoch is currently the Minister pretending to be in charge of the Post Office.

    This is not a career-enhancing role.
    I agree, but she appears to be Teflon with the Tory base. 'Best of a bad bunch' is probably what they'd say.
  • Options
    Foxy said:



    The Loughborough MP Jane Hunt has popped up on social media to promote a go fund me page for her flooded local pub in affluent Quorn. Barely a sympathetic word for her constituents in the council estates and terraced homes in the Belton Road/Meadow Lane area of Loughborough. The Labour councillors and candidate have been out and about touring the areas and talking to people.
    This is a proper disaster for the town, we got off lightly with a couple of inches of vile smelling mud covering our patio and in the garage, while many people have lost everything in downstairs rooms and face months in temporary accommodation and a significant number don't appear to be insured.
    Hunt is the face of the government in the area. They appear to have given up.

    With the ground so saturated and the Soar/Trent so slow moving it looks like it will be a long time to drain. Sounds as if you got off relatively lightly but it's a terrible mess. Best wishes.
    It's genuinely heart breaking. In our village, all of our neighbours had their houses flooded. I spent yesterday jet washing next door's downstairs out after we had put most of the furniture in a skip. I've been roped in to help clear out the sluice gate of debris on the island as the relevant authorities don't have resources. Local residents in the hardest hit areas of town set up kitchens to feed people, collected clothes, nappies, toiletries and food to distribute. It's a shit show, like a disaster you watch in another country, mostly caused by neglect of and lack of maintenance of ditches, drains, sluices. The canal overflowed in town due to a series of blockages and errors. You can't blame the authorities for unprecedented weather, but they are to blame for cutting services that exacerbate the problem.
    Still, that pub in Quorn will be fine.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908

    PB PREDICTIONS COMPETITION 2024

    1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 13

    2. Date of the next UK General Election. = November 14th 2024

    3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Same as current leaders

    4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%).= Lab + majority 10.5% - 31

    5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Trump > Biden

    6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. = Biden (v. narrowly

    7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 3.4%

    8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). = 2.9%

    9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £125 billion

    10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 59

    I don't have insight on these and I've decided most of my predictions wouldn't be worth it, so I haven't done it. That said, all the Olympic predictions are for our medal tally to decrease, and I wonder if this is British pessimism. I know the woke brigade is doing its best to undermine our rowing etc., but I think we should stand a good chance in Paris. It's very close geographically, with very similar competing conditions, and that should advantage our athletes and horses. Sadly Ukraine will be sending less competitors I guess, Russia I doubt they've sent any of their Olympic team to Ukraine, but they might not have a great year either. I am not a great sport follower it must be said, so perhaps the predictors in the 50s have better reasons than I've given.
    I've assumed the medal tally to decrease purely because we've had really good returns since 2008, we've been in the top 5 punching well above our weight (in the absence of 1-2 swimmers cleaning up in the medals, which is the best way to get a good return), so we must surely be due a dip.
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,734

    Foxy said:

    Barnesian said:

    Nigelb said:

    Barnesian said:

    Although I have predicted Penny Mordaunt as Tory leader at end 2024...

    Haven't you just predicted her as leader before a general election this May ? (Which seems brave.)

    Of did I misunderstand your entry ?
    You are right. I misread the question. I meant at end 2024. Oh well.
    Predicting who is leader at the end of 2024 for all parties is an interesting game, though perhaps mid 2025 is fairer to allow time for leadership contests.

    So by Conference season 2025 I expect the following:

    Labour: Starmer

    Conservative: Badenoch

    Liberal Democrats: Cooper

    SNP: Yousef

    Reform: Tice

    Green: Denyer/Ramsey

    Foxy, please note that Badenoch is currently the Minister pretending to be in charge of the Post Office.

    This is not a career-enhancing role.
    I agree, but she appears to be Teflon with the Tory base. 'Best of a bad bunch' is probably what they'd say.
    Teflon is right.

    I cannot understand her appeal myself. She is articulate, but completely anonymous in terms of actually doing stuff.

    She is probably better suited to LOTO than administration, as being all mouth is an advantage there.
  • Options
    Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 30,969
    edited January 6

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    Hmmm. Given that Leon is, I believe, only a few years younger than me, the chances are that when he went to university it was still at the time when only a small minority of teenagers had that opportunity. So saying we should go back to something closer to that, even if we disagree with it, is hardly the hypocrisy you accuse him of.

    50% going to university was a ruse devised to keep school leavers off the unemployment figures. It has not been a success as a policy and has degraded the value of degrees whilst at the same time crreating a whole generation (or more) of young people who are now disastisfied as the promised benefits of higher education have failed to materialise whilst they are saddled with massive amounts of debt.

    Pointing out these facts does not strike me as being unreasonable.
  • Options
    HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 117,097
    Foxy said:

    Barnesian said:

    Nigelb said:

    Barnesian said:

    Although I have predicted Penny Mordaunt as Tory leader at end 2024...

    Haven't you just predicted her as leader before a general election this May ? (Which seems brave.)

    Of did I misunderstand your entry ?
    You are right. I misread the question. I meant at end 2024. Oh well.
    Predicting who is leader at the end of 2024 for all parties is an interesting game, though perhaps mid 2025 is fairer to allow time for leadership contests.

    So by Conference season 2025 I expect the following:

    Labour: Starmer

    Conservative: Badenoch

    Liberal Democrats: Cooper

    SNP: Yousef

    Reform: Tice

    Green: Denyer/Ramsey

    I would agree with most of that except I think Barclay not Badenoch will be Tory leader. The loss of most redwall MPs will mean Badenoch or Braverman won't make the final 2 in my view, it will be Barclay v Tugendhat or Mordaunt instead, although Badenoch would win the membership vote if she got there.

    Davey will end up with 30-40 LD MPs, enough to stay LD leader
  • Options
    Pro_RataPro_Rata Posts: 4,821
    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    The fact he's touring and showed up in non-flooded bits of Nottinghamshire (per MattW) is a thing here.

    Plus, as it's usual silliness rather than unusual silliness, the need to have a response ready and to know when to break from the schedule for an hour or two (and when not), is part of
    the territory.
  • Options
    SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 38,941
    I doubt if my IQ is close to 130. I never had the concentration levels to do a test. My mind wanders after a couple of minutes. It’s not made a moment’s difference to my life. I got my free university education in the 1980s and went from there. I was part of an incredibly fortunate generation.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,518
    kle4 said:

    PB PREDICTIONS COMPETITION 2024

    1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 13

    2. Date of the next UK General Election. = November 14th 2024

    3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Same as current leaders

    4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%).= Lab + majority 10.5% - 31

    5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Trump > Biden

    6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. = Biden (v. narrowly

    7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 3.4%

    8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). = 2.9%

    9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £125 billion

    10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 59

    I don't have insight on these and I've decided most of my predictions wouldn't be worth it, so I haven't done it. That said, all the Olympic predictions are for our medal tally to decrease, and I wonder if this is British pessimism. I know the woke brigade is doing its best to undermine our rowing etc., but I think we should stand a good chance in Paris. It's very close geographically, with very similar competing conditions, and that should advantage our athletes and horses. Sadly Ukraine will be sending less competitors I guess, Russia I doubt they've sent any of their Olympic team to Ukraine, but they might not have a great year either. I am not a great sport follower it must be said, so perhaps the predictors in the 50s have better reasons than I've given.
    I've assumed the medal tally to decrease purely because we've had really good returns since 2008, we've been in the top 5 punching well above our weight (in the absence of 1-2 swimmers cleaning up in the medals, which is the best way to get a good return), so we must surely be due a dip.
    There will be a collapse in several sports due to binning all the people who achieved success.

    Like rowing.
  • Options
    Peter_the_PunterPeter_the_Punter Posts: 13,325

    Polymarket market on SCOTUS on the Colorado ballot access decision:

    https://polymarket.com/event/will-us-supreme-court-vote-to-reinstate-trump-on-colorados-2024-ballot?tid=1704533617165

    Currently showing a 18%-20% chance that they'll let the Colorado decision stand. I guess there are possible wording quibbles since these markets aren't created by professionals but even so 20% seems like a lot?

    My instinct was "no way", but then - the judges don't need to run for reelection. Getting Trump off the board might look to them to be best for the Republicans and conservative side. And as for gratitude to Trump... the adage of "buy a dog" springs to mind.

    And there's also the outside freak chance they might judge it on its merits, but that'd be mad.
    Might be a bit of both, Cookie.

    They might judge it on its merits if they consider it in their political interests to get the orange turd off the ballot.
  • Options
    CD13CD13 Posts: 6,351
    I may as well as a random guess to the list ...

    1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 11.3%
    2. Date of the next UK General Election. Nov 14th 2024
    3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called - Sunak, Starmer. Davey, Yousef, Farage.
    4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). 50.
    5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley and Biden.
    6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Biden (if the man with the scythe misses him).
    7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 2.5%
    8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). 3.1%
    9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). 123 billion.
    10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 55.

  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,734

    Foxy said:



    The Loughborough MP Jane Hunt has popped up on social media to promote a go fund me page for her flooded local pub in affluent Quorn. Barely a sympathetic word for her constituents in the council estates and terraced homes in the Belton Road/Meadow Lane area of Loughborough. The Labour councillors and candidate have been out and about touring the areas and talking to people.
    This is a proper disaster for the town, we got off lightly with a couple of inches of vile smelling mud covering our patio and in the garage, while many people have lost everything in downstairs rooms and face months in temporary accommodation and a significant number don't appear to be insured.
    Hunt is the face of the government in the area. They appear to have given up.

    With the ground so saturated and the Soar/Trent so slow moving it looks like it will be a long time to drain. Sounds as if you got off relatively lightly but it's a terrible mess. Best wishes.
    It's genuinely heart breaking. In our village, all of our neighbours had their houses flooded. I spent yesterday jet washing next door's downstairs out after we had put most of the furniture in a skip. I've been roped in to help clear out the sluice gate of debris on the island as the relevant authorities don't have resources. Local residents in the hardest hit areas of town set up kitchens to feed people, collected clothes, nappies, toiletries and food to distribute. It's a shit show, like a disaster you watch in another country, mostly caused by neglect of and lack of maintenance of ditches, drains, sluices. The canal overflowed in town due to a series of blockages and errors. You can't blame the authorities for unprecedented weather, but they are to blame for cutting services that exacerbate the problem.
    Still, that pub in Quorn will be fine.
    We are going to see more of this too.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/15/flooding-defence-protection-england-properties-cut-nao?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

    Fortunately a bit drier on the East Leics Uplands.
  • Options
    HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 117,097
    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908
    edited January 6
    Foxy said:

    Foxy said:

    Barnesian said:

    Nigelb said:

    Barnesian said:

    Although I have predicted Penny Mordaunt as Tory leader at end 2024...

    Haven't you just predicted her as leader before a general election this May ? (Which seems brave.)

    Of did I misunderstand your entry ?
    You are right. I misread the question. I meant at end 2024. Oh well.
    Predicting who is leader at the end of 2024 for all parties is an interesting game, though perhaps mid 2025 is fairer to allow time for leadership contests.

    So by Conference season 2025 I expect the following:

    Labour: Starmer

    Conservative: Badenoch

    Liberal Democrats: Cooper

    SNP: Yousef

    Reform: Tice

    Green: Denyer/Ramsey

    Foxy, please note that Badenoch is currently the Minister pretending to be in charge of the Post Office.

    This is not a career-enhancing role.
    I agree, but she appears to be Teflon with the Tory base. 'Best of a bad bunch' is probably what they'd say.
    Teflon is right.

    I cannot understand her appeal myself. She is articulate, but completely anonymous in terms of actually doing stuff.

    She is probably better suited to LOTO than administration, as being all mouth is an advantage there.
    In all seriousness, how do we as the public judge ministerial success? Successful policy implementation doesn't show immediate effect most of the time, may not have been the minister's idea, it might be done well but people do not like it, and people will put it down to officials or the PM takes the credit if it is well done.

    On top of that how does a non-anorak have any idea of if a minister is a decent minister on a professional level? Even anoraks don't get much insight into how they are interacting and leading officials or working with political colleagues.

    So we can see when someone is a disaster a lot more than we can if they are decent.

    In which case I can hardly blame the general public for overly praising articulate people who have not obviously screwed up (yet).
  • Options
    noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,804
    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    I suspect human nature being what it is, if a PM visits such an area, they would also get more attention and money from government, than if they remain out of the PMs sight.
  • Options
    twistedfirestopper3twistedfirestopper3 Posts: 2,086
    edited January 6
    Pro_Rata said:

    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    The fact he's touring and showed up in non-flooded bits of Nottinghamshire (per MattW) is a thing here.

    Plus, as it's usual silliness rather than unusual silliness, the need to have a response ready and to know when to break from the schedule for an hour or two (and when not), is part of
    the territory.
    Its a minor MP's wet dream. Show up to the disaster, hand out a hot meal in the kitchen, be sympathetic, promise you'll do what you can to help. Sod off back to you posh, warm, dry home. Tea and medals all round.
    Sadly, our local MPs have given up the pretence of caring.
  • Options
    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,508
    ...
    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    There's something he could do - put a rocket up the relevant agencies to build infrastructure and do the necessary things (dredge) to stop it happening.

    Our local Whatsapp group has the usual. Wrath of God flooding images, and amongst the cacophany of messages 'That's next to my Mum and Dad -a simple two-way drain would fix it. Don't know why they never do it'
  • Options
    SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,927
    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    The biggest disruption to emergency services during the actual crisis, is a politician and a bunch of his hangers-on turning up, distracting both the workers and their senior management from the task in hand.
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,420

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    I was involved for a while with https://london.hackspace.org.uk/

    A communal workshop where students and people in frustrating, dead end white collar jobs could turn metal and wood into noise.

    Because they are frustrated by not actually doing things they want to do, in courses or jobs.

    The irony is trying to maintain the class division of work - success is clean hands - in an age when many high paid jobs require a mix.
    Quite so

    This thought of mine partly springs from a Christmas dinner table conversation with some younger relatives. A young female cousin told us all that she deeply regretted trying to go to university (as was socially and culturally expected of her); she ended up flunking three times, running up debts, she never did more than a year, she has no degree

    Happily, she has now discovered she loves doing up really crappy properties with her husband, it is what she is good at, she is more the planning end of it, he is more the plumbing and wiring, but they mix it up and make a great team, and they have something to be proud of at the end

    She gained literally zero from being pushed to Uni, other than debt, frustration and damaged self-esteem
  • Options
    Peter_the_PunterPeter_the_Punter Posts: 13,325
    HYUFD said:

    Foxy said:

    Barnesian said:

    Nigelb said:

    Barnesian said:

    Although I have predicted Penny Mordaunt as Tory leader at end 2024...

    Haven't you just predicted her as leader before a general election this May ? (Which seems brave.)

    Of did I misunderstand your entry ?
    You are right. I misread the question. I meant at end 2024. Oh well.
    Predicting who is leader at the end of 2024 for all parties is an interesting game, though perhaps mid 2025 is fairer to allow time for leadership contests.

    So by Conference season 2025 I expect the following:

    Labour: Starmer

    Conservative: Badenoch

    Liberal Democrats: Cooper

    SNP: Yousef

    Reform: Tice

    Green: Denyer/Ramsey

    I would agree with most of that except I think Barclay not Badenoch will be Tory leader. The loss of most redwall MPs will mean Badenoch or Braverman won't make the final 2 in my view, it will be Barclay v Tugendhat or Mordaunt instead, although Badenoch would win the membership vote if she got there.

    Davey will end up with 30-40 LD MPs, enough to stay LD leader
    Davey needs to clean the PO shit off his hands, and quick, otherwise your estimate will be badly wrong and he won't stay on as leader.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908
    Pro_Rata said:

    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    The fact he's touring and showed up in non-flooded bits of Nottinghamshire (per MattW) is a thing here.

    Plus, as it's usual silliness rather than unusual silliness, the need to have a response ready and to know when to break from the schedule for an hour or two (and when not), is part of
    the territory.
    It is part of the territory, but it's ridiculous every time because media reporting and opponents have to treat it like a big deal when it is so expected and routine that there's no way they don't know it is routine.
  • Options
    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,508
    edited January 6
    Sandpit said:

    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    The biggest disruption to emergency services during the actual crisis, is a politician and a bunch of his hangers-on turning up, distracting both the workers and their senior management from the task in hand.
    We should also be mindful that what is a deep puddle to you and I could require full diving gear for someone of the PM's stature. Perhaps a helicopter flyover distributing signed Rishi photos would be safer and achieve a similar heartwarming effect.
  • Options
    Peter_the_PunterPeter_the_Punter Posts: 13,325

    kle4 said:

    PB PREDICTIONS COMPETITION 2024

    1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 13

    2. Date of the next UK General Election. = November 14th 2024

    3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Same as current leaders

    4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%).= Lab + majority 10.5% - 31

    5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Trump > Biden

    6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. = Biden (v. narrowly

    7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 3.4%

    8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). = 2.9%

    9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £125 billion

    10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 59

    I don't have insight on these and I've decided most of my predictions wouldn't be worth it, so I haven't done it. That said, all the Olympic predictions are for our medal tally to decrease, and I wonder if this is British pessimism. I know the woke brigade is doing its best to undermine our rowing etc., but I think we should stand a good chance in Paris. It's very close geographically, with very similar competing conditions, and that should advantage our athletes and horses. Sadly Ukraine will be sending less competitors I guess, Russia I doubt they've sent any of their Olympic team to Ukraine, but they might not have a great year either. I am not a great sport follower it must be said, so perhaps the predictors in the 50s have better reasons than I've given.
    I've assumed the medal tally to decrease purely because we've had really good returns since 2008, we've been in the top 5 punching well above our weight (in the absence of 1-2 swimmers cleaning up in the medals, which is the best way to get a good return), so we must surely be due a dip.
    There will be a collapse in several sports due to binning all the people who achieved success.

    Like rowing.
    I've gone low on medals for similar reasons. My guess is 52, which would still be a pretty decent return.

    It will help that the event is being held close to home.
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,420
    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    And of course, and with great irony, it is those hands on “rude mechanical” jobs - plumbier to sparky to carpenter - that will likely survive the AI revolution much longer than middle grade solicitors, accountants, clerks, educators, managers, who will all be replaced quite shortly
  • Options
    HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 117,097
    edited January 6
    Barnesian said:

    Although I have predicted Penny Mordaunt as Tory leader at end 2024, I have a hunch it may be Farage, having led a merger with Reform, - though it will probably take longer than a year.

    It will be a bit like the Liberal/SDP merger. He will get a seat in a by-election post the GE and be elected leader.

    Farage is majority owner of Reform so he's the key decision maker, but he is keeping his distance from Reform as he doesn't want to upset Tory members with the confrontation at the next GE.

    He schmoozed with Tory members and MPs at the Tory conference and is popular with many of them.

    He is a visionary and expert political manipulator.

    Watch this space. Farage next but one leader of the Conservative Party renamed "New Conservative" or "The Conservative and Reform Party".

    Reform wouldn't merge with the Tories a la Canada 2003 to created today's Conservative Party of Canada unless, like Canada 1993, Reform overtook the Tories on votes and seats.

    So Farage wouldn't lead the Conservatives on that basis under FPTP, although if we got PR then the Tories and Reform would probably form governments together like centre right and populist or nationalist right parties now do in Italy, Sweden and New Zealand and Israel and want to do in Spain with PR
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,734
    Sandpit said:

    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    The biggest disruption to emergency services during the actual crisis, is a politician and a bunch of his hangers-on turning up, distracting both the workers and their senior management from the task in hand.
    Though Johnson knew that you have to turn up and make the right noises. Sunak doesn't get it.

    Boris at floods, demonstrating that he has never used a mop before.

    https://youtu.be/v_7RcXvh60g?feature=shared

  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908
    edited January 6

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    Hmmm. Given that Leon is, I believe, only a few years younger than me, the chances are that when he went to university it was still at the time when only a small minority of teenagers had that opportunity. So saying we should go back to something closer to that, even if we disagree with it, is hardly the hypocrisy you accuse him of.

    50% going to university was a ruse devised to keep school leavers off the unemployment figures. It has not been a success as a policy and has degraded the value of degrees whilst at the same time crreating a whole generation (or more) of young people who are now disastisfied as the promised benefits of higher education have failed to materialise whilst they are saddled with massive amounts of debt.

    Pointing out these facts does not strike me as being unreasonable.
    I've been in jobs which now require a degree as an 'essential' job criteria, staffed by people who were recruited when it was not essential and indeed do not have one. I don't have data on it, but it does make me worry people who could be getting decently paying 'middle class' jobs (and are not suited for blue collar jobs which deservedly pay better as being more skilled) are not able to get their foot in the door.
  • Options
    SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 38,941

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    Hmmm. Given that Leon is, I believe, only a few years younger than me, the chances are that when he went to university it was still at the time when only a small minority of teenagers had that opportunity. So saying we should go back to something closer to that, even if we disagree with it, is hardly the hypocrisy you accuse him of.

    50% going to university was a ruse devised to keep school leavers off the unemployment figures. It has not been a success as a policy and has degraded the value of degrees whilst at the same time crreating a whole generation (or more) of young people who are now disastisfied as the promised benefits of higher education have failed to materialise whilst they are saddled with massive amounts of debt.

    Pointing out these facts does not strike me as being unreasonable.

    Wasn’t the point of the original post that Leon didn’t actually do much studying? Instead, he took a lot of drugs and had a lot of sex. It’s a great way to spend three years but why should it only be available to a tiny minority?

  • Options
    PoulterPoulter Posts: 62
    Leon said:

    Poulter said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    You're deluding yourself if you believe that the assumptions that the whole notion of "IQ" rests on are anything other than dimwitted Nazi sh*t. There's no such thing as "general intelligence" (as any woman will be able to tell you), any more than it makes sense to work with an average of voltage, height, and smelliness.

    The whole crock of dimwitted "IQ" evil is so about both class and race.

    Oh look - Lewis "Eugenics" Terman's son founded Silicon Valley.
    lol

    Why would “a woman” be able to tell me things about intelligence that a man cannot? Is that because women are innately more insightful, or empathetic, or gifted with a higher IQ?
    Have you ever bothered questioning the notion of "general intelligence"? It's based on different kinds of intelligence being meaningfully averageable. Women tend to think emotionally better than men. (Rightwing IQ merchants - as if there were any other kind - don't have a monopoly on realising that women and men tend to be different in our bonces.) Most women know that a person (usually a man) can score very highly on skill tests for arithmetic, language, and visuo-spatial, and still be an idiot when it comes to thinking and perceiving emotionally. Not only is this POSSIBLE, but someone's levels of the first kinds of intelligence don't indicate ANYTHING about their level of emotional intelligence. "General intelligence" is an idiotic metric.

    One of my favourite stories about Bobby Fischer, who you probably think it's meaningful to say had a sky-high IQ, concerns his attitude to some pillock who kept following him around in Iceland, seeking his cooperation on making a film about how he had supposedly been born with much greater intellectual potential than almost everybody else on the planet. (>5 standard deviations, that kinda thing.) "Oh no, it's that eugenics guy again", was BF's attitude. Eventually he spoke to him and told him, "Look - the only reason I excelled to such an extent was because I worked harder than everyone else, OK?"

    No doubt you think you know better than Bobby Fischer, and Laszlo Polgar and Richard Williams too, both of whom take the same view - people who have achieved greatness or assisted others in achieving it rather than bumsniffing their way upwards in luvviedom.





  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908
    edited January 6
    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    And of course, and with great irony, it is those hands on “rude mechanical” jobs - plumbier to sparky to carpenter - that will likely survive the AI revolution much longer than middle grade solicitors, accountants, clerks, educators, managers, who will all be replaced quite shortly
    Christ, my job could easily be done by an AI, it's why I'm desperate to hold off the revolution for another 20 years at least. I figure I may get 10.
  • Options
    CiceroCicero Posts: 2,246

    Carnyx said:

    Eabhal said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Foxy said:

    2 more ships going due to problems finding sailors:

    https://twitter.com/larisamlbrown/status/1743373293929828667?t=JkxqV_O0B_Erj2eahIFXUw&s=19

    In large part due to bodged privatisation of recruitment. There are plenty of enquires it seems, just an inability to turn them into sailors.

    https://navylookout.com/royal-navy-failing-to-get-enough-recruits-into-basic-training/

    Mothballing Albion and Bulwark actually makes quite a lot of sense in the context of the ongoing slow motion catastrophe. The UK is never going to do an amphibious assault as, much like an airborne assault, it's one of those operations where everybody dies if it goes wrong. It's too politically risky in this age of TikTok and Sky News. Imagine Shappsie fronting up to Kay Burleigh saying 800 booties are brown bread and she pulls that incredulous face that is 40% veneers, 40% botox and 20% hairspray. Better to put what we crew have on the T23s/T45s/CSG.

    The T45 fleet is in particularly shit order at the moment: 2 broken, 3 in refit, 1 working.
    I would guess that the inability of the Royal Navy to protect the UK's gas imports from Qatar might be slightly more important than the granting of a few licenses in the North Sea.
    On which, I noticed this the other day, sneaked out during the darts:

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/04/uk-government-admits-rosebank-oil-will-not-be-kept-in-uk-to-boost-energy-security

    'The UK government has admitted that oil from the controversial Rosebank field will be sold on the international market rather than to UK consumers.

    Ministers have repeatedly claimed developing the huge oilfield off Shetland will improve UK energy security and help UK consumers, overriding concerns from climate experts and their own advisers.

    In a written answer to a parliamentary question, however, the government appears to accept that the private companies extracting the oil will sell the vast majority internationally, saying: “It is not desirable to force private companies to ‘allocate’ oil and gas produced in the North Sea for domestic use”.'
    Be interesting to see what Labour says on this. I expect it will be silence.
    Well the point is that there are different grades of crude, so Rosebank is medium heavy, compared to the lighter Brent, it doesn't make sense to stockpile only medium grade crude, you need different blends for different purposes.
    The question is whether Britain is stockpiling the blended equivalent of Rosebank production, and the answer is still probably no.
  • Options
    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 39,057

    ...

    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    There's something he could do - put a rocket up the relevant agencies to build infrastructure and do the necessary things (dredge) to stop it happening.

    Our local Whatsapp group has the usual. Wrath of God flooding images, and amongst the cacophany of messages 'That's next to my Mum and Dad -a simple two-way drain would fix it. Don't know why they never do it'
    Yeah, local forums are always filled with people who have half-arsed 'suggestions' at 'fixes' that either won't work, or cause problems elsewhere.

    What we really need are more things like this, but they're mega-expensive, and will have give NIMBY's heart attacks. They can also act as reservoirs for use during droughts.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-off_Channel
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908
    Sandpit said:

    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    The biggest disruption to emergency services during the actual crisis, is a politician and a bunch of his hangers-on turning up, distracting both the workers and their senior management from the task in hand.
    Reality is you have to do some pandering as a politician, so a certain amount of this sort of thing is unavoidable. They cannot complain about playing the political game as the game is their business. But in this instance I'm happy to complain for politicians of all colours for the pantomimes they feel obligated to take part in, as offence or defence.
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 25,009
    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    Any evidence to back that complete codswallop up?
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908

    ...

    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    There's something he could do - put a rocket up the relevant agencies to build infrastructure and do the necessary things (dredge) to stop it happening.

    Our local Whatsapp group has the usual. Wrath of God flooding images, and amongst the cacophany of messages 'That's next to my Mum and Dad -a simple two-way drain would fix it. Don't know why they never do it'
    Yeah, local forums are always filled with people who have half-arsed 'suggestions' at 'fixes' that either won't work, or cause problems elsewhere.

    What we really need are more things like this, but they're mega-expensive, and will have give NIMBY's heart attacks. They can also act as reservoirs for use during droughts.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-off_Channel
    We'd rather restrict water usage than build new resevoirs (or, IDK, a mixture of both), adding they could be used for that as well would be another nail in its coffin as a plan.
  • Options
    isamisam Posts: 40,962
    Foxy said:

    Foxy said:



    The Loughborough MP Jane Hunt has popped up on social media to promote a go fund me page for her flooded local pub in affluent Quorn. Barely a sympathetic word for her constituents in the council estates and terraced homes in the Belton Road/Meadow Lane area of Loughborough. The Labour councillors and candidate have been out and about touring the areas and talking to people.
    This is a proper disaster for the town, we got off lightly with a couple of inches of vile smelling mud covering our patio and in the garage, while many people have lost everything in downstairs rooms and face months in temporary accommodation and a significant number don't appear to be insured.
    Hunt is the face of the government in the area. They appear to have given up.

    With the ground so saturated and the Soar/Trent so slow moving it looks like it will be a long time to drain. Sounds as if you got off relatively lightly but it's a terrible mess. Best wishes.
    It's genuinely heart breaking. In our village, all of our neighbours had their houses flooded. I spent yesterday jet washing next door's downstairs out after we had put most of the furniture in a skip. I've been roped in to help clear out the sluice gate of debris on the island as the relevant authorities don't have resources. Local residents in the hardest hit areas of town set up kitchens to feed people, collected clothes, nappies, toiletries and food to distribute. It's a shit show, like a disaster you watch in another country, mostly caused by neglect of and lack of maintenance of ditches, drains, sluices. The canal overflowed in town due to a series of blockages and errors. You can't blame the authorities for unprecedented weather, but they are to blame for cutting services that exacerbate the problem.
    Still, that pub in Quorn will be fine.
    We are going to see more of this too.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/15/flooding-defence-protection-england-properties-cut-nao?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

    Fortunately a bit drier on the East Leics Uplands.
    There won’t be any of this flooding nonsense once Labour take over

    My heart goes out to everyone devastated by floods. I thank the emergency services for their tireless work.

    Labour's Flood Resilience Taskforce will make sure flood defences are in the right places, and fit for purpose.

    People’s lives shouldn’t be upended by extreme rain.

    https://x.com/keir_starmer/status/1743308661366104172?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,734
    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    Hmmm. Given that Leon is, I believe, only a few years younger than me, the chances are that when he went to university it was still at the time when only a small minority of teenagers had that opportunity. So saying we should go back to something closer to that, even if we disagree with it, is hardly the hypocrisy you accuse him of.

    50% going to university was a ruse devised to keep school leavers off the unemployment figures. It has not been a success as a policy and has degraded the value of degrees whilst at the same time crreating a whole generation (or more) of young people who are now disastisfied as the promised benefits of higher education have failed to materialise whilst they are saddled with massive amounts of debt.

    Pointing out these facts does not strike me as being unreasonable.
    I've been in jobs which now require a degree as an 'essential' job criteria, staffed by people who were recruited when it was not essential and indeed do not have one. I don't have data on it, but it does make me worry people who could be getting decently paying 'middle class' jobs (and are not suited for blue collar jobs which deservedly pay better as being more skilled) are not able to get their foot in the door.
    I have a late twenties nephew who works in IT, having started after leaving school aged 18. Basically he does office moves and sets up systems on site. He seems quite good at it and has a good work ethic, based in Reading.

    Recently his boss appointed a new supervisor over him with just a couple of years experience, but who has a degree. My nephew is trapped in his firm as he hasn't got any formal qualifications that get him a job elsewhere.

    So no Uni debt, reasonable earnings in his twenties, though still living at home with his mum, but with little opportunity to progress. After a couple of years of frustration he is going back to HE to get those bits of paper.

  • Options
    isamisam Posts: 40,962
    edited January 6
    Predicting May 2nd as the GE date seems to me to have all the ingredients to be a classic PB move; take the credit if it’s right, & say the person whose decision it is is highly illogical (wrong) if it isn’t… so kind of being right both ways
  • Options
    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    And of course, and with great irony, it is those hands on “rude mechanical” jobs - plumbier to sparky to carpenter - that will likely survive the AI revolution much longer than middle grade solicitors, accountants, clerks, educators, managers, who will all be replaced quite shortly
    Of those you've mentioned, AI could maybe handle accounting and clerks but would struggle with the rest, which is why its vastly overrated.

    AI may be great at writing reports, but that's a small part of the job of many of those you mentioned. When it comes to human interaction, then AI is not that great and can't be.

    Solicitors need the human connections with their clients or otherwise to ensure they can do their job. AI might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    Show me an AI that can replace educators by ensuring children are all behaving as they should. AI might be a tool that can help educators, but it can't do their job for them.

    Managers jobs (done well) is again to manage human beings and bring out the best in them, I might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    AI is a tool, no different to computers or anything else.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908
    malcolmg said:

    Foxy said:

    Biden full speech in Pennsylvania is here, and we'll worth a listen, it couldn't be more clear.

    https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1743384856002748782?t=KGqaxBQkrvPmOfTVdmJQFw&s=19

    While Trump rambles on about magnets in water in Iowa.

    https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1743473561837179153?t=U52IE-T89PqYtMtWo064bw&s=19

    And tells the parents of a school shooting in Iowa to get over it.

    https://twitter.com/VABVOX/status/1743495544096292986?t=j4qzZEQJLfr2gqNFG9df0g&s=19

    Biden speech was excellent. He is great for his age.
    At the very least the idea he is more mentally fragile than Trump because he's a few years old does not seem bourne out by the evidence of flubs and misspeaking etc.

    The coherence point is harder, since Trump has never been remotely coherent in any case, but his riffs are getting increasingly surreal. I know his people love him as a symbol, but even then tangents must strike them as odd choices sometimes.
  • Options
    HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 117,097
    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    Any evidence to back that complete codswallop up?
    The percentage of white males who are university graduates compared to the percentage of white males with A*-C (or now I suppose 9-4 grade) GCSEs
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908
    isam said:

    Foxy said:

    Foxy said:



    The Loughborough MP Jane Hunt has popped up on social media to promote a go fund me page for her flooded local pub in affluent Quorn. Barely a sympathetic word for her constituents in the council estates and terraced homes in the Belton Road/Meadow Lane area of Loughborough. The Labour councillors and candidate have been out and about touring the areas and talking to people.
    This is a proper disaster for the town, we got off lightly with a couple of inches of vile smelling mud covering our patio and in the garage, while many people have lost everything in downstairs rooms and face months in temporary accommodation and a significant number don't appear to be insured.
    Hunt is the face of the government in the area. They appear to have given up.

    With the ground so saturated and the Soar/Trent so slow moving it looks like it will be a long time to drain. Sounds as if you got off relatively lightly but it's a terrible mess. Best wishes.
    It's genuinely heart breaking. In our village, all of our neighbours had their houses flooded. I spent yesterday jet washing next door's downstairs out after we had put most of the furniture in a skip. I've been roped in to help clear out the sluice gate of debris on the island as the relevant authorities don't have resources. Local residents in the hardest hit areas of town set up kitchens to feed people, collected clothes, nappies, toiletries and food to distribute. It's a shit show, like a disaster you watch in another country, mostly caused by neglect of and lack of maintenance of ditches, drains, sluices. The canal overflowed in town due to a series of blockages and errors. You can't blame the authorities for unprecedented weather, but they are to blame for cutting services that exacerbate the problem.
    Still, that pub in Quorn will be fine.
    We are going to see more of this too.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/15/flooding-defence-protection-england-properties-cut-nao?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

    Fortunately a bit drier on the East Leics Uplands.
    There won’t be any of this flooding nonsense once Labour take over

    My heart goes out to everyone devastated by floods. I thank the emergency services for their tireless work.

    Labour's Flood Resilience Taskforce will make sure flood defences are in the right places, and fit for purpose.

    People’s lives shouldn’t be upended by extreme rain.

    https://x.com/keir_starmer/status/1743308661366104172?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
    What a relief!
  • Options
    HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 117,097
    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    And of course, and with great irony, it is those hands on “rude mechanical” jobs - plumbier to sparky to carpenter - that will likely survive the AI revolution much longer than middle grade solicitors, accountants, clerks, educators, managers, who will all be replaced quite shortly
    Though ultimately nothing could be completely immune from AI leading to a UBI
  • Options
    OmniumOmnium Posts: 9,796
    @Benpointer

    My guesses;

    1. 11%
    2. 5th Dec
    3. No change
    4. Labour - Majority of 15
    5. Trump, Biden
    6. Biden
    7. 3.5%
    8. 1.2%
    9. 120bn
    10. 40

  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,420
    Poulter said:

    Leon said:

    Poulter said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    You're deluding yourself if you believe that the assumptions that the whole notion of "IQ" rests on are anything other than dimwitted Nazi sh*t. There's no such thing as "general intelligence" (as any woman will be able to tell you), any more than it makes sense to work with an average of voltage, height, and smelliness.

    The whole crock of dimwitted "IQ" evil is so about both class and race.

    Oh look - Lewis "Eugenics" Terman's son founded Silicon Valley.
    lol

    Why would “a woman” be able to tell me things about intelligence that a man cannot? Is that because women are innately more insightful, or empathetic, or gifted with a higher IQ?
    Have you ever bothered questioning the notion of "general intelligence"? It's based on different kinds of intelligence being meaningfully averageable. Women tend to think emotionally better than men. (Rightwing IQ merchants - as if there were any other kind - don't have a monopoly on realising that women and men tend to be different in our bonces.) Most women know that a person (usually a man) can score very highly on skill tests for arithmetic, language, and visuo-spatial, and still be an idiot when it comes to thinking and perceiving emotionally. Not only is this POSSIBLE, but someone's levels of the first kinds of intelligence don't indicate ANYTHING about their level of emotional intelligence. "General intelligence" is an idiotic metric.

    One of my favourite stories about Bobby Fischer, who you probably think it's meaningful to say had a sky-high IQ, concerns his attitude to some pillock who kept following him around in Iceland, seeking his cooperation on making a film about how he had supposedly been born with much greater intellectual potential than almost everybody else on the planet. (>5 standard deviations, that kinda thing.) "Oh no, it's that eugenics guy again", was BF's attitude. Eventually he spoke to him and told him, "Look - the only reason I excelled to such an extent was because I worked harder than everyone else, OK?"

    No doubt you think you know better than Bobby Fischer, and Laszlo Polgar and Richard Williams too, both of whom take the same view - people who have achieved greatness or assisted others in achieving it rather than bumsniffing their way upwards in luvviedom.






    Congratulations on including the positive sentence

    “Women tend to think emotionally better than men!”

    In a long angry rant about groups of people being wrongly labelled as innately inferior or superior. Quite superb
  • Options
    MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 25,272
    ...
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    My response was to Malmesbury.

    Nonetheless if the cap fits you are welcome to wear it.

    You've made my point for me. You, like me, entered University from state school and we made the most of our opportunity.

    Why should my liberal elite state educated grandchildren (assuming they ever arrive) have to work on the tills at Lidl whilst PB posters's grandchildren because they send their children and grandchildren to Marlborough or Clifton College and are entitled to their place at Kings and UCL?
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,518
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    I was involved for a while with https://london.hackspace.org.uk/

    A communal workshop where students and people in frustrating, dead end white collar jobs could turn metal and wood into noise.

    Because they are frustrated by not actually doing things they want to do, in courses or jobs.

    The irony is trying to maintain the class division of work - success is clean hands - in an age when many high paid jobs require a mix.
    Quite so

    This thought of mine partly springs from a Christmas dinner table conversation with some younger relatives. A young female cousin told us all that she deeply regretted trying to go to university (as was socially and culturally expected of her); she ended up flunking three times, running up debts, she never did more than a year, she has no degree

    Happily, she has now discovered she loves doing up really crappy properties with her husband, it is what she is good at, she is more the planning end of it, he is more the plumbing and wiring, but they mix it up and make a great team, and they have something to be proud of at the end

    She gained literally zero from being pushed to Uni, other than debt, frustration and damaged self-esteem
    I know a case that went like this

    1) crappy first degree
    2) frustration
    3) joined a building firm specialising in restoration of listed properties
    4) did a Masters in Georgian architecture that gets quoted a lot in research.

    I do wonder if the emphasis on doing a degree at 18 is insane. I did something that worked for me - almost by accident. At 18 I was pretty much an idiot when it came to planning my life.

    I’ve seen a lot of people who are frank that they did the wrong degree.
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,734
    isam said:

    Foxy said:

    Foxy said:



    The Loughborough MP Jane Hunt has popped up on social media to promote a go fund me page for her flooded local pub in affluent Quorn. Barely a sympathetic word for her constituents in the council estates and terraced homes in the Belton Road/Meadow Lane area of Loughborough. The Labour councillors and candidate have been out and about touring the areas and talking to people.
    This is a proper disaster for the town, we got off lightly with a couple of inches of vile smelling mud covering our patio and in the garage, while many people have lost everything in downstairs rooms and face months in temporary accommodation and a significant number don't appear to be insured.
    Hunt is the face of the government in the area. They appear to have given up.

    With the ground so saturated and the Soar/Trent so slow moving it looks like it will be a long time to drain. Sounds as if you got off relatively lightly but it's a terrible mess. Best wishes.
    It's genuinely heart breaking. In our village, all of our neighbours had their houses flooded. I spent yesterday jet washing next door's downstairs out after we had put most of the furniture in a skip. I've been roped in to help clear out the sluice gate of debris on the island as the relevant authorities don't have resources. Local residents in the hardest hit areas of town set up kitchens to feed people, collected clothes, nappies, toiletries and food to distribute. It's a shit show, like a disaster you watch in another country, mostly caused by neglect of and lack of maintenance of ditches, drains, sluices. The canal overflowed in town due to a series of blockages and errors. You can't blame the authorities for unprecedented weather, but they are to blame for cutting services that exacerbate the problem.
    Still, that pub in Quorn will be fine.
    We are going to see more of this too.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/15/flooding-defence-protection-england-properties-cut-nao?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

    Fortunately a bit drier on the East Leics Uplands.
    There won’t be any of this flooding nonsense once Labour take over

    My heart goes out to everyone devastated by floods. I thank the emergency services for their tireless work.

    Labour's Flood Resilience Taskforce will make sure flood defences are in the right places, and fit for purpose.

    People’s lives shouldn’t be upended by extreme rain.

    https://x.com/keir_starmer/status/1743308661366104172?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
    Yep, it's bollocks and we all know it's bollocks, but that's politics. When natural disasters or deaths happen politicians have to make the right noises.

    Politicians moaning about it is like a fish complaining of being wet.
  • Options
    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,508

    ...

    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    There's something he could do - put a rocket up the relevant agencies to build infrastructure and do the necessary things (dredge) to stop it happening.

    Our local Whatsapp group has the usual. Wrath of God flooding images, and amongst the cacophany of messages 'That's next to my Mum and Dad -a simple two-way drain would fix it. Don't know why they never do it'
    Yeah, local forums are always filled with people who have half-arsed 'suggestions' at 'fixes' that either won't work, or cause problems elsewhere.

    What we really need are more things like this, but they're mega-expensive, and will have give NIMBY's heart attacks. They can also act as reservoirs for use during droughts.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-off_Channel
    Sounds a bit like a suggestion on a forum to me.
  • Options
    Peter_the_PunterPeter_the_Punter Posts: 13,325
    Poulter said:

    Leon said:

    Poulter said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    You're deluding yourself if you believe that the assumptions that the whole notion of "IQ" rests on are anything other than dimwitted Nazi sh*t. There's no such thing as "general intelligence" (as any woman will be able to tell you), any more than it makes sense to work with an average of voltage, height, and smelliness.

    The whole crock of dimwitted "IQ" evil is so about both class and race.

    Oh look - Lewis "Eugenics" Terman's son founded Silicon Valley.
    lol

    Why would “a woman” be able to tell me things about intelligence that a man cannot? Is that because women are innately more insightful, or empathetic, or gifted with a higher IQ?
    Have you ever bothered questioning the notion of "general intelligence"? It's based on different kinds of intelligence being meaningfully averageable. Women tend to think emotionally better than men. (Rightwing IQ merchants - as if there were any other kind - don't have a monopoly on realising that women and men tend to be different in our bonces.) Most women know that a person (usually a man) can score very highly on skill tests for arithmetic, language, and visuo-spatial, and still be an idiot when it comes to thinking and perceiving emotionally. Not only is this POSSIBLE, but someone's levels of the first kinds of intelligence don't indicate ANYTHING about their level of emotional intelligence. "General intelligence" is an idiotic metric.

    One of my favourite stories about Bobby Fischer, who you probably think it's meaningful to say had a sky-high IQ, concerns his attitude to some pillock who kept following him around in Iceland, seeking his cooperation on making a film about how he had supposedly been born with much greater intellectual potential than almost everybody else on the planet. (>5 standard deviations, that kinda thing.) "Oh no, it's that eugenics guy again", was BF's attitude. Eventually he spoke to him and told him, "Look - the only reason I excelled to such an extent was because I worked harder than everyone else, OK?"

    No doubt you think you know better than Bobby Fischer, and Laszlo Polgar and Richard Williams too, both of whom take the same view - people who have achieved greatness or assisted others in achieving it rather than bumsniffing their way upwards in luvviedom.





    i can confirm your remarks about Fischer, Poulter.

    He once famously remarked that he devoted 98% of his mental energy to chess, and 2% to other things, whereas it was the other way round for most of his opponents. Incidentally, he was no prodigy. At 11 he was a strong junior but by no means the best around. By 13 however he was US Junior Champion and clearly a player of outstanding potential. This meteoric rise appears to have been due largely to hard work and avoidance of formal schooling.
  • Options
    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    Any evidence to back that complete codswallop up?
    The percentage of white males who are university graduates compared to the percentage of white males with A*-C (or now I suppose 9-4 grade) GCSEs
    And those percentages are . . . ?

    Or are you making this up?

    And have you controlled for age? You need to be comparing like for like, eg at 22, not comparing 22 year old graduates versus pensioners.
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 25,009
    HYUFD said:

    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    Any evidence to back that complete codswallop up?
    The percentage of white males who are university graduates compared to the percentage of white males with A*-C (or now I suppose 9-4 grade) GCSEs
    1 minor minor part of your original statement and even then you haven't provided the evidence to back that bit up.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908
    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    Hmmm. Given that Leon is, I believe, only a few years younger than me, the chances are that when he went to university it was still at the time when only a small minority of teenagers had that opportunity. So saying we should go back to something closer to that, even if we disagree with it, is hardly the hypocrisy you accuse him of.

    50% going to university was a ruse devised to keep school leavers off the unemployment figures. It has not been a success as a policy and has degraded the value of degrees whilst at the same time crreating a whole generation (or more) of young people who are now disastisfied as the promised benefits of higher education have failed to materialise whilst they are saddled with massive amounts of debt.

    Pointing out these facts does not strike me as being unreasonable.
    I've been in jobs which now require a degree as an 'essential' job criteria, staffed by people who were recruited when it was not essential and indeed do not have one. I don't have data on it, but it does make me worry people who could be getting decently paying 'middle class' jobs (and are not suited for blue collar jobs which deservedly pay better as being more skilled) are not able to get their foot in the door.
    I have a late twenties nephew who works in IT, having started after leaving school aged 18. Basically he does office moves and sets up systems on site. He seems quite good at it and has a good work ethic, based in Reading.

    Recently his boss appointed a new supervisor over him with just a couple of years experience, but who has a degree. My nephew is trapped in his firm as he hasn't got any formal qualifications that get him a job elsewhere.

    So no Uni debt, reasonable earnings in his twenties, though still living at home with his mum, but with little opportunity to progress. After a couple of years of frustration he is going back to HE to get those bits of paper.

    It'd odd because I don't think anyone has ever asked to actually see my degrees before and I don't think they all check with the university in question, so unless its a more technical field where the first hiring requires demonstration of knowledge in that specific field, once you are in many organisations having a degree may not come up ever again.*

    Makes me surprised there are not more stories about people just faking the qualifications. Hopefully not in your profession though.

    *bizarrely some training course providers require proof of GCSE English and Maths proficiency, and won't accept, say, a PhD in statistics as a substitute.
  • Options
    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,508

    ...

    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    There's something he could do - put a rocket up the relevant agencies to build infrastructure and do the necessary things (dredge) to stop it happening.

    Our local Whatsapp group has the usual. Wrath of God flooding images, and amongst the cacophany of messages 'That's next to my Mum and Dad -a simple two-way drain would fix it. Don't know why they never do it'
    Sorry that should say 'Facebook', not WhatsApp.
  • Options
    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 39,057
    FPT:
    MaxPB said:

    As it turns out the "breakthroughs" China said they had in semiconductors were likely bullshit. Huawei phone teardowns have revealed the 5nm "domestic" chip is actually made in a Taiwanese foundry, not in an SMIC foundry in China as had been implied by the CCP and Huawei.

    As I believe I predicted. :)

    And an article about it:
    https://www.gizmochina.com/2024/01/06/huaweis-5nm-kirin-9006c-chip-is-made-by-tsmc-not-smic/
  • Options
    algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,593

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    And of course, and with great irony, it is those hands on “rude mechanical” jobs - plumbier to sparky to carpenter - that will likely survive the AI revolution much longer than middle grade solicitors, accountants, clerks, educators, managers, who will all be replaced quite shortly
    Of those you've mentioned, AI could maybe handle accounting and clerks but would struggle with the rest, which is why its vastly overrated.

    AI may be great at writing reports, but that's a small part of the job of many of those you mentioned. When it comes to human interaction, then AI is not that great and can't be.

    Solicitors need the human connections with their clients or otherwise to ensure they can do their job. AI might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    Show me an AI that can replace educators by ensuring children are all behaving as they should. AI might be a tool that can help educators, but it can't do their job for them.

    Managers jobs (done well) is again to manage human beings and bring out the best in them, I might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    AI is a tool, no different to computers or anything else.
    AI will be good at writing reports. Yes. However the overwhelming majority of reports make no difference to any aspect of the planet, and one of the secrets of a happy life is never ever to write or read a report (especially more than a single side of A4) which is either useless, uninteresting or irrelevant to you/the planet.

    The important question is how good AI will be at writing that tiny proportion of reports that are any use (and working out which they are). Beveridge comes to mind.
  • Options
    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 39,057

    ...

    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    There's something he could do - put a rocket up the relevant agencies to build infrastructure and do the necessary things (dredge) to stop it happening.

    Our local Whatsapp group has the usual. Wrath of God flooding images, and amongst the cacophany of messages 'That's next to my Mum and Dad -a simple two-way drain would fix it. Don't know why they never do it'
    Yeah, local forums are always filled with people who have half-arsed 'suggestions' at 'fixes' that either won't work, or cause problems elsewhere.

    What we really need are more things like this, but they're mega-expensive, and will have give NIMBY's heart attacks. They can also act as reservoirs for use during droughts.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-off_Channel
    Sounds a bit like a suggestion on a forum to me.
    Indeed. But one put forward by someone who actually studied civil engineering, and also caveated with issues about such a plan. Which is more than many 'suggestions' get...
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,420

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    And of course, and with great irony, it is those hands on “rude mechanical” jobs - plumbier to sparky to carpenter - that will likely survive the AI revolution much longer than middle grade solicitors, accountants, clerks, educators, managers, who will all be replaced quite shortly
    Of those you've mentioned, AI could maybe handle accounting and clerks but would struggle with the rest, which is why its vastly overrated.

    AI may be great at writing reports, but that's a small part of the job of many of those you mentioned. When it comes to human interaction, then AI is not that great and can't be.

    Solicitors need the human connections with their clients or otherwise to ensure they can do their job. AI might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    Show me an AI that can replace educators by ensuring children are all behaving as they should. AI might be a tool that can help educators, but it can't do their job for them.

    Managers jobs (done well) is again to manage human beings and bring out the best in them, I might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    AI is a tool, no different to computers or anything else.
    Keep telling yourself that, if it reassures you. Nothing wrong with Denial, it has its place
  • Options
    edmundintokyoedmundintokyo Posts: 17,151

    Polymarket market on SCOTUS on the Colorado ballot access decision:

    https://polymarket.com/event/will-us-supreme-court-vote-to-reinstate-trump-on-colorados-2024-ballot?tid=1704533617165

    Currently showing a 18%-20% chance that they'll let the Colorado decision stand. I guess there are possible wording quibbles since these markets aren't created by professionals but even so 20% seems like a lot?

    My instinct was "no way", but then - the judges don't need to run for reelection. Getting Trump off the board might look to them to be best for the Republicans and conservative side. And as for gratitude to Trump... the adage of "buy a dog" springs to mind.

    And there's also the outside freak chance they might judge it on its merits, but that'd be mad.
    This is a really fascinating question because we really don't know what makes them tick and there are wildly different theories (and could be different for different justices):

    - Tribal conservative: You read conservative media, you hate the libs, you support your team, of course you rule for Trump
    - Strategic conservative: You want to advance conservative goals, and you're clear-eyed about how to do that. Boot Trump off the ballot, you probably get a better candidate who's more likely to win and lock in your power and less likely to lose the Senate and the House. You also look non-partisan and above-the-fray which will help you when you want to make all kinds of other decisions that advance conservative causes.
    - Judge on the merits: It could still go either way, we've seen judgements in both directions from not necessarily partisan judges.
  • Options
    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    Hmmm. Given that Leon is, I believe, only a few years younger than me, the chances are that when he went to university it was still at the time when only a small minority of teenagers had that opportunity. So saying we should go back to something closer to that, even if we disagree with it, is hardly the hypocrisy you accuse him of.

    50% going to university was a ruse devised to keep school leavers off the unemployment figures. It has not been a success as a policy and has degraded the value of degrees whilst at the same time crreating a whole generation (or more) of young people who are now disastisfied as the promised benefits of higher education have failed to materialise whilst they are saddled with massive amounts of debt.

    Pointing out these facts does not strike me as being unreasonable.
    I've been in jobs which now require a degree as an 'essential' job criteria, staffed by people who were recruited when it was not essential and indeed do not have one. I don't have data on it, but it does make me worry people who could be getting decently paying 'middle class' jobs (and are not suited for blue collar jobs which deservedly pay better as being more skilled) are not able to get their foot in the door.
    I have a late twenties nephew who works in IT, having started after leaving school aged 18. Basically he does office moves and sets up systems on site. He seems quite good at it and has a good work ethic, based in Reading.

    Recently his boss appointed a new supervisor over him with just a couple of years experience, but who has a degree. My nephew is trapped in his firm as he hasn't got any formal qualifications that get him a job elsewhere.

    So no Uni debt, reasonable earnings in his twenties, though still living at home with his mum, but with little opportunity to progress. After a couple of years of frustration he is going back to HE to get those bits of paper.

    I know many people who've gone to university either in midlife or otherwise simply after 18, after working, and all have improved their lives by doing so.

    There is too much of a notion that university is just for eighteen year olds, that's not to say that people shouldn't go at 18, but it should be open to those who want to go afterwards too.

    Unfortunately if you've got children and responsibilities then taking three years out of work, and getting into debt, in order to improve things years down the line can seem very daunting.
  • Options
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    And of course, and with great irony, it is those hands on “rude mechanical” jobs - plumbier to sparky to carpenter - that will likely survive the AI revolution much longer than middle grade solicitors, accountants, clerks, educators, managers, who will all be replaced quite shortly
    Of those you've mentioned, AI could maybe handle accounting and clerks but would struggle with the rest, which is why its vastly overrated.

    AI may be great at writing reports, but that's a small part of the job of many of those you mentioned. When it comes to human interaction, then AI is not that great and can't be.

    Solicitors need the human connections with their clients or otherwise to ensure they can do their job. AI might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    Show me an AI that can replace educators by ensuring children are all behaving as they should. AI might be a tool that can help educators, but it can't do their job for them.

    Managers jobs (done well) is again to manage human beings and bring out the best in them, I might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    AI is a tool, no different to computers or anything else.
    Keep telling yourself that, if it reassures you. Nothing wrong with Denial, it has its place
    Its not denial, its reality. You're just a hypochondriac Luddite.

    Technology has been "taking away jobs" for 500 years. Remarkably, we're all still employed.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    I was involved for a while with https://london.hackspace.org.uk/

    A communal workshop where students and people in frustrating, dead end white collar jobs could turn metal and wood into noise.

    Because they are frustrated by not actually doing things they want to do, in courses or jobs.

    The irony is trying to maintain the class division of work - success is clean hands - in an age when many high paid jobs require a mix.
    Quite so

    This thought of mine partly springs from a Christmas dinner table conversation with some younger relatives. A young female cousin told us all that she deeply regretted trying to go to university (as was socially and culturally expected of her); she ended up flunking three times, running up debts, she never did more than a year, she has no degree

    Happily, she has now discovered she loves doing up really crappy properties with her husband, it is what she is good at, she is more the planning end of it, he is more the plumbing and wiring, but they mix it up and make a great team, and they have something to be proud of at the end

    She gained literally zero from being pushed to Uni, other than debt, frustration and damaged self-esteem
    I know a case that went like this

    1) crappy first degree
    2) frustration
    3) joined a building firm specialising in restoration of listed properties
    4) did a Masters in Georgian architecture that gets quoted a lot in research.

    I do wonder if the emphasis on doing a degree at 18 is insane. I did something that worked for me - almost by accident. At 18 I was pretty much an idiot when it came to planning my life.

    I’ve seen a lot of people who are frank that they did the wrong degree.
    As an, in theory, training ground for adult life and work there's value to be had even if choosing the 'wrong' subject, because, really, how many people really know what they want to do at that age, get a job in that area, and then find it is indeed the thing they want to do? But still end up hopefully with core skills that enable them to slot in to many areas.

    I don't know what the ideal percentage going to University is, I don't think a return to numbers seen in the past is right, but even when I was 17 my cohort were skeptical of 50% as being arbitrary. Not sure how we could shift things to a situation where maybe you bumble around for a few years, and only then take a learning break to target a profession you can be more confident is what you want.
  • Options
    Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,997
    AI: I have lost some work (writing) to AI. I also know a voice actor who's had a lot of work dry up.
  • Options
    MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 25,272

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    I was involved for a while with https://london.hackspace.org.uk/

    A communal workshop where students and people in frustrating, dead end white collar jobs could turn metal and wood into noise.

    Because they are frustrated by not actually doing things they want to do, in courses or jobs.

    The irony is trying to maintain the class division of work - success is clean hands - in an age when many high paid jobs require a mix.
    I understand all that, and I make a living out of mandatory ( paid by the learner or their employer) NVQ type vocational qualifications, and in the right context they have a value. In the wrong context state-funded NVQs are a waste of tax payers money.

    My point is, despite (for the moment) plasterers earning big money, PB posters are still minded to spend their hard earned on private and university educations for their children. They haven't reached the road to Damascus and thought let's send the kids to a sink comp and then onto the local technical college for an NVQ2 in construction. But they think that's where mine belong. Bish, bash ,bish. Loafsamoney?
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    And of course, and with great irony, it is those hands on “rude mechanical” jobs - plumbier to sparky to carpenter - that will likely survive the AI revolution much longer than middle grade solicitors, accountants, clerks, educators, managers, who will all be replaced quite shortly
    Of those you've mentioned, AI could maybe handle accounting and clerks but would struggle with the rest, which is why its vastly overrated.

    AI may be great at writing reports, but that's a small part of the job of many of those you mentioned. When it comes to human interaction, then AI is not that great and can't be.

    Solicitors need the human connections with their clients or otherwise to ensure they can do their job. AI might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    Show me an AI that can replace educators by ensuring children are all behaving as they should. AI might be a tool that can help educators, but it can't do their job for them.

    Managers jobs (done well) is again to manage human beings and bring out the best in them, I might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    AI is a tool, no different to computers or anything else.
    Keep telling yourself that, if it reassures you. Nothing wrong with Denial, it has its place
    Its not denial, its reality. You're just a hypochondriac Luddite.

    Technology has been "taking away jobs" for 500 years. Remarkably, we're all still employed.
    I think the biggest fears are indeed overblown, but I do also think we should be careful not to assume it will all just work itself out because it has before.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,908

    ...

    kle4 said:

    With all the justifiable crap he gets, I see Sunak still gets unjustifiable crap as well, because of the inevitable silliness we get for all PMs when there is flooding, where we have to pretend it really matters for a PM and their entourage to show up in person (to all different areas?) and if they don't they do not care.


    There's something he could do - put a rocket up the relevant agencies to build infrastructure and do the necessary things (dredge) to stop it happening.

    Our local Whatsapp group has the usual. Wrath of God flooding images, and amongst the cacophany of messages 'That's next to my Mum and Dad -a simple two-way drain would fix it. Don't know why they never do it'
    Yeah, local forums are always filled with people who have half-arsed 'suggestions' at 'fixes' that either won't work, or cause problems elsewhere.

    What we really need are more things like this, but they're mega-expensive, and will have give NIMBY's heart attacks. They can also act as reservoirs for use during droughts.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-off_Channel
    Sounds a bit like a suggestion on a forum to me.
    Indeed. But one put forward by someone who actually studied civil engineering, and also caveated with issues about such a plan. Which is more than many 'suggestions' get...
    For some reason I'm getting 'Building on Brownfield solves everything with no downsides' coming to mind.
  • Options
    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 39,057
    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    And of course, and with great irony, it is those hands on “rude mechanical” jobs - plumbier to sparky to carpenter - that will likely survive the AI revolution much longer than middle grade solicitors, accountants, clerks, educators, managers, who will all be replaced quite shortly
    Of those you've mentioned, AI could maybe handle accounting and clerks but would struggle with the rest, which is why its vastly overrated.

    AI may be great at writing reports, but that's a small part of the job of many of those you mentioned. When it comes to human interaction, then AI is not that great and can't be.

    Solicitors need the human connections with their clients or otherwise to ensure they can do their job. AI might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    Show me an AI that can replace educators by ensuring children are all behaving as they should. AI might be a tool that can help educators, but it can't do their job for them.

    Managers jobs (done well) is again to manage human beings and bring out the best in them, I might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    AI is a tool, no different to computers or anything else.
    Keep telling yourself that, if it reassures you. Nothing wrong with Denial, it has its place
    Its not denial, its reality. You're just a hypochondriac Luddite.

    Technology has been "taking away jobs" for 500 years. Remarkably, we're all still employed.
    I think the biggest fears are indeed overblown, but I do also think we should be careful not to assume it will all just work itself out because it has before.
    I'm fairly unconcerned about the medium- and long-term effects of the current AI systems on work.

    My biggest fear is muppets 'trusting' the current systems with tasks that will end up getting people killed.
  • Options
    PoulterPoulter Posts: 62

    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    And of course, and with great irony, it is those hands on “rude mechanical” jobs - plumbier to sparky to carpenter - that will likely survive the AI revolution much longer than middle grade solicitors, accountants, clerks, educators, managers, who will all be replaced quite shortly
    Of those you've mentioned, AI could maybe handle accounting and clerks but would struggle with the rest, which is why its vastly overrated.

    AI may be great at writing reports, but that's a small part of the job of many of those you mentioned. When it comes to human interaction, then AI is not that great and can't be.

    Solicitors need the human connections with their clients or otherwise to ensure they can do their job. AI might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    Show me an AI that can replace educators by ensuring children are all behaving as they should. AI might be a tool that can help educators, but it can't do their job for them.

    Managers jobs (done well) is again to manage human beings and bring out the best in them, I might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    AI is a tool, no different to computers or anything else.
    Keep telling yourself that, if it reassures you. Nothing wrong with Denial, it has its place
    Its not denial, its reality. You're just a hypochondriac Luddite.

    Technology has been "taking away jobs" for 500 years. Remarkably, we're all still employed.
    I think the biggest fears are indeed overblown, but I do also think we should be careful not to assume it will all just work itself out because it has before.
    I'm fairly unconcerned about the medium- and long-term effects of the current AI systems on work.

    My biggest fear is muppets 'trusting' the current systems with tasks that will end up getting people killed.
    They won't just dole out free food and accommodation and beanbags to a 100x enlarged reserve army of labour, then, as if it were the Summer of Love but going on forever?
  • Options
    dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,993

    An optimist's predictions for 2024:

    1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 5%

    2. Date of the next UK General Election. 2 May 2024

    3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called Sunak, Starmer, Dave, Tice

    4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour, 45

    5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Trump, Biden

    6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Biden

    7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 2.7%

    8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). 5.2%

    9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £105 bn

    10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 42

    Cameron leading the LD's and Tice the SNP?
    That's more than optimistic!
  • Options

    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    And of course, and with great irony, it is those hands on “rude mechanical” jobs - plumbier to sparky to carpenter - that will likely survive the AI revolution much longer than middle grade solicitors, accountants, clerks, educators, managers, who will all be replaced quite shortly
    Of those you've mentioned, AI could maybe handle accounting and clerks but would struggle with the rest, which is why its vastly overrated.

    AI may be great at writing reports, but that's a small part of the job of many of those you mentioned. When it comes to human interaction, then AI is not that great and can't be.

    Solicitors need the human connections with their clients or otherwise to ensure they can do their job. AI might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    Show me an AI that can replace educators by ensuring children are all behaving as they should. AI might be a tool that can help educators, but it can't do their job for them.

    Managers jobs (done well) is again to manage human beings and bring out the best in them, I might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    AI is a tool, no different to computers or anything else.
    Keep telling yourself that, if it reassures you. Nothing wrong with Denial, it has its place
    Its not denial, its reality. You're just a hypochondriac Luddite.

    Technology has been "taking away jobs" for 500 years. Remarkably, we're all still employed.
    I think the biggest fears are indeed overblown, but I do also think we should be careful not to assume it will all just work itself out because it has before.
    I'm fairly unconcerned about the medium- and long-term effects of the current AI systems on work.

    My biggest fear is muppets 'trusting' the current systems with tasks that will end up getting people killed.
    Killed may be an exaggeration, but I "liked" your comment because you've hit the nail on the head.

    The Post Office scandal comes to mind, AI being trusted like Fujitsu's system was trusted, leading to negative consequences that ruin people's lives is the biggest risk.

    Computers have been automating jobs people used to do for years, but we still have companies desperate to hire, as employment evolves, it always has done. AI is the next step in that evolution, an evolution that has never stopped since the industrial revolution began.
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,420

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    You will need to point out the place where I suggested awarding degree education on the basis of social class. “The elite”

    I went to a comprehensive. And I went to UCL. I thoroughly approve of that sort of thing; if anything I can be quite chippy about public school kids getting an easy ride into uni via tuition and social polish, when it is much harder for state school children from tougher backgrounds

    My objection is nothing to do with social class. I am saying we are encouraging kids with average intelligence to spend three years doing a tertiary education designed for people with higher intelligence, and this is a waste of their time and their money, as we now demand that they pay for it

    it would be great if every child had an IQ of 130 and would deeply benefit from studying Medicine at Manchester Uni, or Classics at Cambridge, but it is not the case, and we are deluding ourselves - and our offspring - in thinking and pretending otherwise
    One way of reading the data is to conclude that white working class males are the group who have spotted this as they intelligently eschew Aeschylus and the sociology of 8th century Mali in favour of the factory and white van man trades (and where I live, agricultural contracting) great and small.
    Indeed, white males with only B grade or C grade average GCSEs are far more likely to get an apprenticeship or traineeship without uni tuition fees than do A levels and go to university (even though they probably could). Whereas most other groups, white women or ethnic minorities, would still do A levels and go to the university with those grades
    And of course, and with great irony, it is those hands on “rude mechanical” jobs - plumbier to sparky to carpenter - that will likely survive the AI revolution much longer than middle grade solicitors, accountants, clerks, educators, managers, who will all be replaced quite shortly
    Of those you've mentioned, AI could maybe handle accounting and clerks but would struggle with the rest, which is why its vastly overrated.

    AI may be great at writing reports, but that's a small part of the job of many of those you mentioned. When it comes to human interaction, then AI is not that great and can't be.

    Solicitors need the human connections with their clients or otherwise to ensure they can do their job. AI might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    Show me an AI that can replace educators by ensuring children are all behaving as they should. AI might be a tool that can help educators, but it can't do their job for them.

    Managers jobs (done well) is again to manage human beings and bring out the best in them, I might be a tool that can help them, but it can't do their job for them.

    AI is a tool, no different to computers or anything else.
    Keep telling yourself that, if it reassures you. Nothing wrong with Denial, it has its place
    Its not denial, its reality. You're just a hypochondriac Luddite.

    Technology has been "taking away jobs" for 500 years. Remarkably, we're all still employed.
    Not many people left working the fields, nor are there many women weaving at home

    In past technological revolutions, humans have been able to upgrade - those farmhands went to work in the factories. When the factories were mechanised, they went to work in offices

    Now AI is coming for all the office jobs (and many creative jobs, too). Where will the workers go then, and what will they do? This time there is no obvious higher realm. Perhaps they can all retrain as vicars
  • Options
    MJWMJW Posts: 1,361

    Polymarket market on SCOTUS on the Colorado ballot access decision:

    https://polymarket.com/event/will-us-supreme-court-vote-to-reinstate-trump-on-colorados-2024-ballot?tid=1704533617165

    Currently showing a 18%-20% chance that they'll let the Colorado decision stand. I guess there are possible wording quibbles since these markets aren't created by professionals but even so 20% seems like a lot?

    My instinct was "no way", but then - the judges don't need to run for reelection. Getting Trump off the board might look to them to be best for the Republicans and conservative side. And as for gratitude to Trump... the adage of "buy a dog" springs to mind.

    And there's also the outside freak chance they might judge it on its merits, but that'd be mad.
    This is a really fascinating question because we really don't know what makes them tick and there are wildly different theories (and could be different for different justices):

    - Tribal conservative: You read conservative media, you hate the libs, you support your team, of course you rule for Trump
    - Strategic conservative: You want to advance conservative goals, and you're clear-eyed about how to do that. Boot Trump off the ballot, you probably get a better candidate who's more likely to win and lock in your power and less likely to lose the Senate and the House. You also look non-partisan and above-the-fray which will help you when you want to make all kinds of other decisions that advance conservative causes.
    - Judge on the merits: It could still go either way, we've seen judgements in both directions from not necessarily partisan judges.
    There's a reasonable argument for Democrats that while it's much better for them electorally if Trump is on the ballot, ultimately for the good of America the best outcome is that he isn't and they lose to a sane conservative.

    That probably kills off Trumpism for the foreseeable, returns the GOP to sanity as party elites see they can win without kowtowing to Trump. Hopefully they then begin to return to a politics that isn't a destructive zero-sum game in which both sides, justifiably in some ways, think they have to go all in on their wilder ideological positions or the other will destroy them.
  • Options
    algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,593
    edited January 6

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Pitching for the PB demographic.

    Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
    ..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

    *Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?

    I saw on TwiX yesterday that the average IQ of an undergraduate is now 102

    We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
    For your next PB alias, you should go with either Statler, or Waldorf.
    On the other hand, I am entirely right, aren’t I?

    We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver

    It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
    That is a classic case of "Conductor, being as I am on the bus you can now ring the bell, don't concern yourself with all those queued at the bus stop".

    You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.

    You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
    The real problem is that, in many cases, they get to toil in the coal mines. After their degree in shagging.

    Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
    I understand all that, but you will invest in your child's education to ensure they get their opportunity for a three year BSc (Econ) (Hons) in Applied Fornication.

    The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
    I was involved for a while with https://london.hackspace.org.uk/

    A communal workshop where students and people in frustrating, dead end white collar jobs could turn metal and wood into noise.

    Because they are frustrated by not actually doing things they want to do, in courses or jobs.

    The irony is trying to maintain the class division of work - success is clean hands - in an age when many high paid jobs require a mix.
    I understand all that, and I make a living out of mandatory ( paid by the learner or their employer) NVQ type vocational qualifications, and in the right context they have a value. In the wrong context state-funded NVQs are a waste of tax payers money.

    My point is, despite (for the moment) plasterers earning big money, PB posters are still minded to spend their hard earned on private and university educations for their children. They haven't reached the road to Damascus and thought let's send the kids to a sink comp and then onto the local technical college for an NVQ2 in construction. But they think that's where mine belong. Bish, bash ,bish. Loafsamoney?
    May I suggest that every single thought in the second para is either misleading or incorrect, except that plasterers are doing OK.

    Two points: PB posters are a self selecting group, so no meaningful conclusions can be drawn from any self selection bias. Secondly, you fall into the fallacy of thinking that people can't think two compatible things at the same time. It is perfectly possible to think that it is good that X can do a PhD in Elamite cuneiform and that Y can be a brickie.

    What is bad is compulsion or the narrowing of opportunity.
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