Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
You are assuming Doctor and GP are the same thing. They aren't. My wife was a chemical pathologist. Only a handful of jobs come up at any one time with competition for them. You can't just move from one speciality to another at the drop of a hat. She couldn't just move to be a GP. Doctors are fortunate. It generally isn't a problem, but it also isn't straightforward.
My assumption from context was that @DecrepiterJohnL was referring to a medical doctor. GP was just a specific example because we hear regularly about expensive locums / gaps in coverage due to the challenge of hiring.
Specialists are more complex in that there are fewer candidates for fewer roles
For example I probably have about 20 people in the UK who do what I do (and about 400 who aspire to do what I do). And if you go even more specialist I have 2 competitors globally and between us we control 80% of the market.
Rather like the Northern Rock crisis showed our dependence on a viable banking system and the inherent risk to both economic and social order from a failure of that system, yesterday's Vodafone outage showed how dependent we are on Broadband and mobile phone coverage.
The confusion of when what you expect and rely on isn't there is at the heart of this - even something as obvious as a tube strike or engineering works confuses those who walk up in ignorance to the station and expect a train service to be running.
Perhaps because I'm of that generation whose formative experience was power cuts, three day weeks and frequent strikes, I react differently to younger souls who have become used to it all always being there.
Resilience isn't just an infrastructural concept - it's also personal. I try to have plans for all kinds of scenarios such asd what would I do if I locked myself out of Stodge Towers accidentally?
Contrary to some, my experience of the pandemic was the resilience provided by our network of corner shops here in East Ham who never ran out of anything and rarely closed. The supermarket panics were largely a function of the disruption of the JIT system and we've seen it at other times when a particular product is either short in supply or long in demand.
The other side is adaptability and ingenuity - one might argue the strength of a dynamic capitalist economy. The pandemic saw some firms redirect their business - we sourced meat, vegetables and milk (among other things) from companies who normally supplied restaurants and cafes but they switched to providing a service for domestic customers.
MY experience of this in the working environment was dealing with the Emergency Planning function at a local council - copies of all their protocols and procedures were on paper in fireproof safes for dealing with contingencies from plane crashes to nuclear war. The pandemic response illustrated some failings but mostly, I thought, local Government did very well co-ordinating with the NHS, Police and other groups via a Resilience Forum which had been set up to deal with civil contingencies.
Let us suppose that by some malign or other catastrophe all UK smart phones ceased all telecoms functions for an extended period. How would the following month pan out? Could a novelist trying to describe it cope with the ramifications?
Mentally I belong to the pre smartphone era even though I have one. But for some of the smartphone generation it alone is your: bank, all other financial services including all transactions, all visual and spoken media, retailer, library, newspapers, communications, workplace, social life and much else.
What would happen? And it seems to me that Murphy's great principle applies: if it can happen, sometimes it will. I wonder what the government's risk register has to say about it, and what then plan is?
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
It has been widely publicised that companies have suspended or closed graduate recruitment schemes, and that there are insufficient places for newly-qualified GPs. But even if we want the doctors to get warehouse jobs, there aren't enough jobs available for the number of people looking for them. It is that simple.
The UK is very good at innovation. We punch well above our weight in research. Yet successive governments keep effectively cutting university funding and introducing hostile policies.
But innovation isn’t enough. Going from innovation to market is hard. Innovators may look to larger markets (US, EU), particularly in areas where regulation is complex (which it needs to be in pharma).
We have plenty of creative, talented, people, but lack the necessary cadre of competent middle to senior management.
The header could be read along with the Nobel committee's summary of Mokyr's work to understand the changing symbiotic relationship between science and technology which is the fount of economic growth. In the modern world the USA has replaced the UK of the industrial revolution as the locus of change pushing the production possibilities frontier outwards. But other nations (now including the UK, China etc) will catch up, just as other countries caught up with the UK after our industrial revolution
In some respects, China already has.
They've proved, up to a point, that massive state intervention across all aspects of the economy can work (though note that alongside that, they also allow/foster cutthroat market competition).
Whether their model is sustainable is an open question. Whatever it is, it's not communism (except they've hung on to the vile authoritarianism that goes along with communism).
“On Monday afternoon, for a short time, the Vodafone network had an issue affecting broadband, 4G and 5G services. This was triggered by a non-malicious software issue with one of our vendor partners which has now been resolved, and the network has fully recovered. We apologise for any inconvenience this caused our customers.”
That means their DNS got changed, or their primary domain expired.
A massive fcukup from their IT department, pleased I’m not their CIO this morning.
At present what we do know is that, for a few hours yesterday, Vodafone effectively stopped advertising that it existed to the internet by removing themselves from the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The BGP system is a protocol that helps to link the internet together by exchanging routing information with Autonomous Systems (AS), such as those run by your ISP (each provider will have many peers and routes to send data).
Networks around the world need to talk to each other in order to do peering and determine which routes are the best ones for them to send their data, which is what BGP facilitates. The BGP is normally one of those things that works seamlessly in the background, but problems can occur due to issues such as a misconfiguration by a network provider, traffic hijacking and the failure of critical systems within an ISP.
We don’t currently know exactly what caused Vodafone to unpublish their routes from the BGP, although the operator did confirm to some other news media that it wasn’t related to a cyberattack. The most likely explanation seems to be a misconfiguration of some sort, but we’re speculating.
Vodafone don’t only provide consumer and normal business connectivity, they also have a wholesale / Ethernet side, and this is why some other ISPs reported disruption at the same time (interconnectivity was disrupted too).
Someone, probably a very senior network engineer to have that level of access, is going to be turning up to work this morning with a resignation letter in their pocket having had no sleep last night.
“On Monday afternoon, for a short time, the Vodafone network had an issue affecting broadband, 4G and 5G services. This was triggered by a non-malicious software issue with one of our vendor partners which has now been resolved, and the network has fully recovered. We apologise for any inconvenience this caused our customers.”
That means their DNS got changed, or their primary domain expired.
A massive fcukup from their IT department, pleased I’m not their CIO this morning.
At present what we do know is that, for a few hours yesterday, Vodafone effectively stopped advertising that it existed to the internet by removing themselves from the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The BGP system is a protocol that helps to link the internet together by exchanging routing information with Autonomous Systems (AS), such as those run by your ISP (each provider will have many peers and routes to send data).
Networks around the world need to talk to each other in order to do peering and determine which routes are the best ones for them to send their data, which is what BGP facilitates. The BGP is normally one of those things that works seamlessly in the background, but problems can occur due to issues such as a misconfiguration by a network provider, traffic hijacking and the failure of critical systems within an ISP.
We don’t currently know exactly what caused Vodafone to unpublish their routes from the BGP, although the operator did confirm to some other news media that it wasn’t related to a cyberattack. The most likely explanation seems to be a misconfiguration of some sort, but we’re speculating.
Vodafone don’t only provide consumer and normal business connectivity, they also have a wholesale / Ethernet side, and this is why some other ISPs reported disruption at the same time (interconnectivity was disrupted too).
Someone, probably a very senior network engineer to have that level of access, is going to be turning up to work this morning with a resignation letter in their pocket having had no sleep last night.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
You are assuming Doctor and GP are the same thing. They aren't. My wife was a chemical pathologist. Only a handful of jobs come up at any one time with competition for them. You can't just move from one speciality to another at the drop of a hat. She couldn't just move to be a GP. Doctors are fortunate. It generally isn't a problem, but it also isn't straightforward.
My assumption from context was that @DecrepiterJohnL was referring to a medical doctor. GP was just a specific example because we hear regularly about expensive locums / gaps in coverage due to the challenge of hiring.
Specialists are more complex in that there are fewer candidates for fewer roles
For example I probably have about 20 people in the UK who do what I do (and about 400 who aspire to do what I do). And if you go even more specialist I have 2 competitors globally and between us we control 80% of the market.
Refreshing to see the humble left out of humble bragging.
Happy Last Ever Patch Tuesday for Windows 10 users who have not sold their soul to Microsoft for an extra year of updates Day.
In a world where computers now regularly last for 5-8 years without too much trouble in domestic environments, this probably goes down as one of Microsoft’s worst decisions of all time.
When they launched W10, the idea was that it would be basically the last Windows O/S, with everything afterwards just being updates.
W11 added little new apart from adverts, telemetry, and forcing Microsoft Account on everyone. It’s purely a commercial decision to get rid of W10, at the cost of hundreds of millions of computers. The sort of thing that antitrust regulators should be all over.
FPT: Most interesting. IIRC 'Which' reckon that about a quarter of Win 10 users didn't plan to do anything at all - I assume because many didn't really know what was going on or what was what.
My own experience is that intelligent but non-nerdy and busy friends were quite startled when I checked round them last week - one only just managed to get the free one year update.
I can't help wondering if this is going to be a major scandal from the point of view of IT security.
Anyway, have finished going through all our own computers for scrapping or updating or returning to work. Off to the shop this week to get my new desktop (the old one having done eight years and the monitor about 15 so not too upset). Which has reminded me of my Microsoft Surface Book PC (type 1) bought a decade ago. Because of my frustration when the battery failed in 2-3 years. Meh, except that the battery is glued in. Not user replaceable, without a very high risk of breaking the screen, motherboard and/or battery. Nowhere in Edinburgh would touch it. So an excellent bit of kit became so much junk. And I can't get the hard drive out of it either, for percussive memory erasure (aka my hammer). So I need to take it to the shop for the drive to be nuked and then scrapped (probably just making the rubble bounce, as Win 10 does have some sort of an erasure facility, which I used, but just to be sure ...).
Yes there’s potentially an issue with W10 a year or two from now, with tens of millions of systems no longer getting security updates. Most home users have no idea about end of support and what it actually means in practice.
If there’s a serious bug found, MS are probably going to have no choice but to push a fix. There’s probably a group of hackers already sitting on the exploit, biding their time until they can use it to maximum effect.
The UK is very good at innovation. We punch well above our weight in research. Yet successive governments keep effectively cutting university funding and introducing hostile policies.
But innovation isn’t enough. Going from innovation to market is hard. Innovators may look to larger markets (US, EU), particularly in areas where regulation is complex (which it needs to be in pharma).
We have plenty of creative, talented, people, but lack the necessary cadre of competent middle to senior management.
The universities are just about the only world class thing we have left and yet Phillipson seems to be totally asleep at the wheel as they collapse.
Has she said one thing about unis since becoming education sec?
But seems she still has some spare time as she is running to be deputy - a job that presumably involves some hours a week away from her actual day job.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
You are assuming Doctor and GP are the same thing. They aren't. My wife was a chemical pathologist. Only a handful of jobs come up at any one time with competition for them. You can't just move from one speciality to another at the drop of a hat. She couldn't just move to be a GP. Doctors are fortunate. It generally isn't a problem, but it also isn't straightforward.
My assumption from context was that @DecrepiterJohnL was referring to a medical doctor. GP was just a specific example because we hear regularly about expensive locums / gaps in coverage due to the challenge of hiring.
Specialists are more complex in that there are fewer candidates for fewer roles
For example I probably have about 20 people in the UK who do what I do (and about 400 who aspire to do what I do). And if you go even more specialist I have 2 competitors globally and between us we control 80% of the market.
Increasing specialisation is part of modernity. I notice it among solicitors. I knew lots of the old style provincial generalists: draft a will in the morning, do a magistrates drunk driving plea in the afternoon pop back to the office to review ongoing personal injury litigation, spend the evening being clerk to a local charity for the common good, get buttonholed afterwards by a friend going through divorce talking about children and money.
Not now. They tend to know one area brilliantly well, but if they know about wills and IHT, they can't tell a fingerprint from the rule against hearsay, and unless they specialise in litigation have never once stepped ina court.
Inevitable I suppose, but I miss the old characters.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
You are assuming Doctor and GP are the same thing. They aren't. My wife was a chemical pathologist. Only a handful of jobs come up at any one time with competition for them. You can't just move from one speciality to another at the drop of a hat. She couldn't just move to be a GP. Doctors are fortunate. It generally isn't a problem, but it also isn't straightforward.
My assumption from context was that @DecrepiterJohnL was referring to a medical doctor. GP was just a specific example because we hear regularly about expensive locums / gaps in coverage due to the challenge of hiring.
Specialists are more complex in that there are fewer candidates for fewer roles
For example I probably have about 20 people in the UK who do what I do (and about 400 who aspire to do what I do). And if you go even more specialist I have 2 competitors globally and between us we control 80% of the market.
She is a medical doctor. You do know that pathologists are medical doctors don't you? She is much more highly qualified than a GP, but she still couldn't do a GPs role. It requires post graduate training. Quoting my wife when she qualified she was useless. They all need substantial training after that. So a GP can't be a brain surgeon, who can't be an anaesthetist, who can't be a pathologist. With maybe the exception of GPs there are limited roles to move to. You can't just move somewhere you don't want to go to or take a pay cut. The roles just don't exist. In my wife's case only one or two consultant roles came up each year and they are not going to take you on as a training role. They just don't.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
Millions of Brits unemployed or on benefits yet the chippie is hiring a migrant on a visa. Something is broken.
Whole feckin country is broken , they seem to have unlimited money to hose out for any ailment real or imagined. If it had to come out of the dumb MP's wages they would have benefits cut pronto.
FPT - I think UK supply chains and trading systems are highly efficient, but fragile.
The whole system probably goes down with stock and food unavailable inside 48-72 hours with any major disruption. Leading to civil disorder.
There's no resilience since no-one grows, stores or cooks anything anymore. So we'd go hungry very quickly.
Nah, one thing the pandemic shows is that retailers can adapt, look how all the supermarkets scaled up their home deliveries at the end of March 2020/start of April 2020.
If the supermarkets lost internet access, their tills would work just fine as they have a server on site.
What wouldn’t work are local card payments and the stock control system, which would see the place empty in a couple of days.
In that scenario, you want to have cash.
Their home delivery servers *should* have at two different internet suppliers plus Starlink in the data centre, but getting the order data to the warehouses and then the delivery drivers could prove more problematic.
Supermarkets and department stores really should look at Starlink backups at retail and warehouse locations, that’s the sort of thing their IT teams will be working through as a result of yesterday’s outage.
The UK is very good at innovation. We punch well above our weight in research. Yet successive governments keep effectively cutting university funding and introducing hostile policies.
But innovation isn’t enough. Going from innovation to market is hard. Innovators may look to larger markets (US, EU), particularly in areas where regulation is complex (which it needs to be in pharma).
We have plenty of creative, talented, people, but lack the necessary cadre of competent middle to senior management.
So why is that?
Not my department, but two questions spring to mind.
One is that the people who could be doing that are doing other things instead. If so, what and why?
Another is whether it's part of the (lack of) Captain Mainwaring problem. We've got rid of many of the small-scale management jobs, and removed independence from many of the rest. How do you get good at big-scale management without doing something smaller first? Assuming AI takes off, that could make things worse, strengthening the illusion that a single genius can run everything (and take all the rewards) from their hollowed out volcanic lair.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
You are assuming Doctor and GP are the same thing. They aren't. My wife was a chemical pathologist. Only a handful of jobs come up at any one time with competition for them. You can't just move from one speciality to another at the drop of a hat. She couldn't just move to be a GP. Doctors are fortunate. It generally isn't a problem, but it also isn't straightforward.
My assumption from context was that @DecrepiterJohnL was referring to a medical doctor. GP was just a specific example because we hear regularly about expensive locums / gaps in coverage due to the challenge of hiring.
Specialists are more complex in that there are fewer candidates for fewer roles
For example I probably have about 20 people in the UK who do what I do (and about 400 who aspire to do what I do). And if you go even more specialist I have 2 competitors globally and between us we control 80% of the market.
Refreshing to see the humble left out of humble bragging.
He’s just being humble, not bragging
He’s merely saying he specialises, with some success, in a career which relatively few seek out - 400 wanting 20 jobs
If you want a brag, take my job. I consistently write travel for half a living. Probably 300 people in the UK do that, tops, yet 3,000,000 would LOVE to do it, and 300,000 try
FPT - I think UK supply chains and trading systems are highly efficient, but fragile.
The whole system probably goes down with stock and food unavailable inside 48-72 hours with any major disruption. Leading to civil disorder.
There's no resilience since no-one grows, stores or cooks anything anymore. So we'd go hungry very quickly.
The UK grows about 85% of the wheat we eat, although bad harvests last year pushed that down a bit. We grow about 70-80% of our potatoes. Over the year (more in summer), we grow about 20% of our tomatoes. I think it’s well over 80% of our beef is grown domestically. It’s over two thirds of chickens. 40-50% of our pork. 85% of milk production. Over half of our sugar production. Nearly all of our salmon.
M&S were recently selling sockeye salmon.
Which has to be better for you than the farmed Scottish muck. May as well eat a bag of random chemicals.
the M&S sockeye is crap, tasteless and dry as old boots
Microsoft have been shits for years. You end up stuck with Windows because your employer almost certainly requires it. But its *awful*. The joy of 5 years of running my own business is buying my own stuff. And despite having to integrate to various client systems from across Europe, MacOS works fine.
This is definitely something that has got better over the years -- the rise of the internet and of mobile means that the companies and systems you have to interact with are much more likely to give you a pdf or a web page than a Word document, and that "everyone runs windows" isn't the easy almost correct assumption it was in the 1990s. And the tools for handling Office docs on non MS platforms are better too.
(I have managed generally to avoid having Windows at work by working in tech firms with a sufficiently large population of militant Linux users to require IT to permit it.)
Someone needs to have a word (heh!) with my local health centre, which insists on sending me messages in some archaic .doc format that all of my mobile apps (even MS Word) struggle to read.
The header could be read along with the Nobel committee's summary of Mokyr's work to understand the changing symbiotic relationship between science and technology which is the fount of economic growth. In the modern world the USA has replaced the UK of the industrial revolution as the locus of change pushing the production possibilities frontier outwards. But other nations (now including the UK, China etc) will catch up, just as other countries caught up with the UK after our industrial revolution
In some respects, China already has.
They've proved, up to a point, that massive state intervention across all aspects of the economy can work (though note that alongside that, they also allow/foster cutthroat market competition).
Whether their model is sustainable is an open question. Whatever it is, it's not communism (except they've hung on to the vile authoritarianism that goes along with communism).
Another interesting point of comparison, and again the Nobel prize comes in, is in the Covid mitigations in Britain and America. Our furlough scheme supported companies by underwriting their payroll costs. America directed its support at workers laid off by increasing unemployment benefit. In America, when the tide goes out, you discover which companies were swimming naked. By allowing bad companies to fail and then chucking vast amounts of government subsidies to support new industries, America's economy has soared ahead of ours. Chalk autopen one up for Sleepy Joe.
The UK is very good at innovation. We punch well above our weight in research. Yet successive governments keep effectively cutting university funding and introducing hostile policies.
But innovation isn’t enough. Going from innovation to market is hard. Innovators may look to larger markets (US, EU), particularly in areas where regulation is complex (which it needs to be in pharma).
We were, de facto, the EU medicines regulator until Brexit.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
You are assuming Doctor and GP are the same thing. They aren't. My wife was a chemical pathologist. Only a handful of jobs come up at any one time with competition for them. You can't just move from one speciality to another at the drop of a hat. She couldn't just move to be a GP. Doctors are fortunate. It generally isn't a problem, but it also isn't straightforward.
My assumption from context was that @DecrepiterJohnL was referring to a medical doctor. GP was just a specific example because we hear regularly about expensive locums / gaps in coverage due to the challenge of hiring.
Specialists are more complex in that there are fewer candidates for fewer roles
For example I probably have about 20 people in the UK who do what I do (and about 400 who aspire to do what I do). And if you go even more specialist I have 2 competitors globally and between us we control 80% of the market.
Refreshing to see the humble left out of humble bragging.
He’s just being humble, not bragging
He’s merely saying he specialises, with some success, in a career which relatively few seek out - 400 wanting 20 jobs
If you want a brag, take my job. I consistently write travel for half a living. Probably 300 people in the UK do that, tops, yet 3,000,000 would LOVE to do it, and 300,000 try
The header could be read along with the Nobel committee's summary of Mokyr's work to understand the changing symbiotic relationship between science and technology which is the fount of economic growth. In the modern world the USA has replaced the UK of the industrial revolution as the locus of change pushing the production possibilities frontier outwards. But other nations (now including the UK, China etc) will catch up, just as other countries caught up with the UK after our industrial revolution
In some respects, China already has.
They've proved, up to a point, that massive state intervention across all aspects of the economy can work (though note that alongside that, they also allow/foster cutthroat market competition).
Whether their model is sustainable is an open question. Whatever it is, it's not communism (except they've hung on to the vile authoritarianism that goes along with communism).
Another interesting point of comparison, and again the Nobel prize comes in, is in the Covid mitigations in Britain and America. Our furlough scheme supported companies by underwriting their payroll costs. America directed its support at workers laid off by increasing unemployment benefit. In America, when the tide goes out, you discover which companies were swimming naked. By allowing bad companies to fail and then chucking vast amounts of government subsidies to support new industries, America's economy has soared ahead of ours. Chalk autopen one up for Sleepy Joe.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
It takes genius to create a shortage of GPs and a shortage of jobs for GPs at the same time.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
It takes genius to create a shortage of GPs and a shortage of jobs for GPs at the same time.
They’ve made changes to the specialised training pathways this year. For example, you get more “points” if you only pick IMT but if you pick IMT and GP training, you don’t get the bonus points and will probably only get on the GP pathway. This works for my girlfriend who wants to do IMT not GP training.
FPT - I think UK supply chains and trading systems are highly efficient, but fragile.
The whole system probably goes down with stock and food unavailable inside 48-72 hours with any major disruption. Leading to civil disorder.
There's no resilience since no-one grows, stores or cooks anything anymore. So we'd go hungry very quickly.
Nah, one thing the pandemic shows is that retailers can adapt, look how all the supermarkets scaled up their home deliveries at the end of March 2020/start of April 2020.
If the supermarkets lost internet access, their tills would work just fine as they have a server on site.
What wouldn’t work are local card payments and the stock control system, which would see the place empty in a couple of days.
In that scenario, you want to have cash.
Their home delivery servers *should* have at two different internet suppliers plus Starlink in the data centre, but getting the order data to the warehouses and then the delivery drivers could prove more problematic.
Supermarkets and department stores really should look at Starlink backups at retail and warehouse locations, that’s the sort of thing their IT teams will be working through as a result of yesterday’s outage.
Yet they prefer to skimp on IT
I can bet there’s at least one retail chain having a crisis meeting this morning, having gone all-in on cloud-based point-of-sale with no local fallback.
If they weren’t directly affected yesterday, they are belatedly realising they could be next.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Is the issue location? I can imagine a reluctance among some young doctors to take a job in rural Lincolnshire or Wales.
The header could be read along with the Nobel committee's summary of Mokyr's work to understand the changing symbiotic relationship between science and technology which is the fount of economic growth. In the modern world the USA has replaced the UK of the industrial revolution as the locus of change pushing the production possibilities frontier outwards. But other nations (now including the UK, China etc) will catch up, just as other countries caught up with the UK after our industrial revolution
In some respects, China already has.
They've proved, up to a point, that massive state intervention across all aspects of the economy can work (though note that alongside that, they also allow/foster cutthroat market competition).
Whether their model is sustainable is an open question. Whatever it is, it's not communism (except they've hung on to the vile authoritarianism that goes along with communism).
Another interesting point of comparison, and again the Nobel prize comes in, is in the Covid mitigations in Britain and America. Our furlough scheme supported companies by underwriting their payroll costs. America directed its support at workers laid off by increasing unemployment benefit. In America, when the tide goes out, you discover which companies were swimming naked. By allowing bad companies to fail and then chucking vast amounts of government subsidies to support new industries, America's economy has soared ahead of ours. Chalk autopen one up for Sleepy Joe.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
It takes genius to create a shortage of GPs and a shortage of jobs for GPs at the same time.
I think we're producing enough doctors but don't have enough Foxys to train up people like my partner.
It would take a brave politician to reduce current provision in order to generate more capacity in 5+ years time.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
It takes genius to create a shortage of GPs and a shortage of jobs for GPs at the same time.
I think we're producing enough doctors but don't have enough Foxys to train up people like my partner.
It would take a brave politician to reduce current provision in order to generate more capacity in 5+ years time.
I don’t think you are allowed to apply in both England and Scotland at the same time this year, which is an interesting change.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Is the issue location? I can imagine a reluctance among some young doctors to take a job in rural Lincolnshire or Wales.
Perhaps in some cases but the overall applicant: placement ratio is 5:1 (though there is some double counting). For other specialisms like psychiatry it's 20:1.
DYOR. I'm getting a mix of Scottish/English anecdotes and don't have more than a vague sense. She comes out with more acronyms than Dura_Ace.
FPT - I think UK supply chains and trading systems are highly efficient, but fragile.
The whole system probably goes down with stock and food unavailable inside 48-72 hours with any major disruption. Leading to civil disorder.
There's no resilience since no-one grows, stores or cooks anything anymore. So we'd go hungry very quickly.
Nah, one thing the pandemic shows is that retailers can adapt, look how all the supermarkets scaled up their home deliveries at the end of March 2020/start of April 2020.
If the supermarkets lost internet access, their tills would work just fine as they have a server on site.
What wouldn’t work are local card payments and the stock control system, which would see the place empty in a couple of days.
In that scenario, you want to have cash.
Their home delivery servers *should* have at two different internet suppliers plus Starlink in the data centre, but getting the order data to the warehouses and then the delivery drivers could prove more problematic.
Supermarkets and department stores really should look at Starlink backups at retail and warehouse locations, that’s the sort of thing their IT teams will be working through as a result of yesterday’s outage.
It's annoying to say this but given that any land based backup route is going to follow the same path, Starlink is probably an essential backup connection...
What’s annoying about it, unless your shop is in the middle of a big mall and you can’t find anywhere to stick the dish?
Low-orbit satellite broadband is a game-changer for applications such as backup connections for critical infrastructure and large businesses. It’s a lot easier and cheaper to stick a dish on the roof, than to get a second fibre internet connection that doesn’t have a potential single point of failure with the primary.
Oh the annoying bit is giving a Monopoly money - beyond that yep it’s essential backup if you can’t move your staff to where a connection still exists
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
It takes genius to create a shortage of GPs and a shortage of jobs for GPs at the same time.
They’ve made changes to the specialised training pathways this year. For example, you get more “points” if you only pick IMT but if you pick IMT and GP training, you don’t get the bonus points and will probably only get on the GP pathway. This works for my girlfriend who wants to do IMT not GP training.
In the old days, GPs required no training. Five years of medical school, pass your exams (and not necessarily a degree until a decade or so ago) a year as House Officer before full registration, and then off to find or found a GP surgery. Probably this has improved standards but maybe it is just some influential GPs wanted to make their speciality seem as hard and themselves as important as the surgeons they met on the golf course.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
It takes genius to create a shortage of GPs and a shortage of jobs for GPs at the same time.
I think we're producing enough doctors but don't have enough Foxys to train up people like my partner.
It would take a brave politician to reduce current provision in order to generate more capacity in 5+ years time.
When this was discussed before, it was pointed out that there might be spare capacity in the Philippines - which acts as a giant training centre for medics for the world.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
It takes genius to create a shortage of GPs and a shortage of jobs for GPs at the same time.
I think we're producing enough doctors but don't have enough Foxys to train up people like my partner.
It would take a brave politician to reduce current provision in order to generate more capacity in 5+ years time.
That is true but there is a separate GP problem related to how practices are funded. Basically, the NHS hands out more money for (associate) roles below doctor and less for actual doctors.
BREAKING: Israel's military says it carried out a shooting after "several suspects" crossed the line of withdrawal and approached forces operating in northern Gaza.
Going to be very interesting to see what happens to Green polling if Sultana and Corbyn can ever bury the axe and get their party launched.
The crank left expend most of their energy fighting the true enemy - traitors in their own ranks. This conference they have announced - there will be factional fighting over the composition and membership of the committees formed to decide things like a constitution and a name.
Meanwhile, the Green Party are up and running with a dynamic new leader who can speak in a more compelling way than Magic Grandpa or Zarah lunacy.
The UK is very good at innovation. We punch well above our weight in research. Yet successive governments keep effectively cutting university funding and introducing hostile policies.
But innovation isn’t enough. Going from innovation to market is hard. Innovators may look to larger markets (US, EU), particularly in areas where regulation is complex (which it needs to be in pharma).
We have plenty of creative, talented, people, but lack the necessary cadre of competent middle to senior management.
The universities are just about the only world class thing we have left and yet Phillipson seems to be totally asleep at the wheel as they collapse.
Has she said one thing about unis since becoming education sec?
But seems she still has some spare time as she is running to be deputy - a job that presumably involves some hours a week away from her actual day job.
That would be a useless education minister replacing a useless housing minister as Labour's deputy leader.
A reminder of how well the UK construction sector is currently doing:
September data suggested that the UK construction sector faced pressure on multiple fronts as residential, commercial and civil engineering work all continued to decrease at solid rates. Lower volumes of overall construction output have been recorded since January, although the latest reduction was the slowest for three months and the downturn in new orders was the softest so far in 2025.
Business activity expectations for the year ahead were among the lowest since the end of 2022, suggesting that construction companies remained cautious about the near-term outlook and have yet to see a turning point on the horizon. Some firms hope for a boost from lower borrowing costs and noted new sales pipelines in areas such as energy security markets and infrastructure projects. However, many survey respondents reported caution among clients ahead of the Autumn Budget and a general reluctance to commit to major capital expenditure projects against a subdued domestic economic backdrop.
Weak business optimism, shrinking workloads and robust cost pressures once again led to lower employment numbers across the construction sector. Lower staffing levels have now been recorded for nine months in a row, which is the longest period of job shedding since the pandemic.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
You are assuming Doctor and GP are the same thing. They aren't. My wife was a chemical pathologist. Only a handful of jobs come up at any one time with competition for them. You can't just move from one speciality to another at the drop of a hat. She couldn't just move to be a GP. Doctors are fortunate. It generally isn't a problem, but it also isn't straightforward.
My assumption from context was that @DecrepiterJohnL was referring to a medical doctor. GP was just a specific example because we hear regularly about expensive locums / gaps in coverage due to the challenge of hiring.
Specialists are more complex in that there are fewer candidates for fewer roles
For example I probably have about 20 people in the UK who do what I do (and about 400 who aspire to do what I do). And if you go even more specialist I have 2 competitors globally and between us we control 80% of the market.
Refreshing to see the humble left out of humble bragging.
Nah. It’s just a niche market that is worth about $20m a year. I invented the specialisation about 20 years ago, and my two competitors are the former business that I left and my former partner at that company (who also left post a merger they did).
It’s a global business that isn’t large enough for the big generalists to care about and is too complicated for the local players.
So my employer books about $7-8m a year keeps half of it for its shareholders / operating costs and pays my team out of the rest.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Is the issue location? I can imagine a reluctance among some young doctors to take a job in rural Lincolnshire or Wales.
Ok a couple of caveats here: I don't know about GP training which will be greater and I am looking at many decades ago, but trainee doctors went to wherever the roles were. You were expected to move to a new hospital in a new area. For instance my wife went from Aberdeen to Leicester to London (St Georges). I know Foxy went in the reverse direction, ending up in Leicester from London.
Trump’s so-called ‘peace plan’ is a farce. It is inconsistent with international law and human rights protections.
Our Government should unequivocally condemn it because it will cause even more suffering for the Palestinian people who have already endured so much.
Our Government should keep as far away as possible from Middle Eastern affairs. We've done more than enough harm already, from the Balfour Declaration to the Iraq War. Driving the Ottomans back to the Turkish border was, I suppose, OK; picking over the corpse with the French like a pair of hungry vultures wasn't.
PS On reflection, I suppose the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam was, in general, a Good Thing.
The UK is very good at innovation. We punch well above our weight in research. Yet successive governments keep effectively cutting university funding and introducing hostile policies.
But innovation isn’t enough. Going from innovation to market is hard. Innovators may look to larger markets (US, EU), particularly in areas where regulation is complex (which it needs to be in pharma).
We have plenty of creative, talented, people, but lack the necessary cadre of competent middle to senior management.
So why is that?
Not my department, but two questions spring to mind.
One is that the people who could be doing that are doing other things instead. If so, what and why?
Another is whether it's part of the (lack of) Captain Mainwaring problem. We've got rid of many of the small-scale management jobs, and removed independence from many of the rest. How do you get good at big-scale management without doing something smaller first? Assuming AI takes off, that could make things worse, strengthening the illusion that a single genius can run everything (and take all the rewards) from their hollowed out volcanic lair.
Largely as explained in your last paragraph, IMHO.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
It takes genius to create a shortage of GPs and a shortage of jobs for GPs at the same time.
I think we're producing enough doctors but don't have enough Foxys to train up people like my partner.
It would take a brave politician to reduce current provision in order to generate more capacity in 5+ years time.
When this was discussed before, it was pointed out that there might be spare capacity in the Philippines - which acts as a giant training centre for medics for the world.
Send our proto-medics there for training?
We kind of already do. Lots of NHS staff, doctors and nurses are immigrants from the Philippines or India (and since Brexit, not so much Europe). You can spin this as a good or bad thing depending on your politics but beware, the zeitgeist is changing. Are we nobly supporting countries and people less well off, or stripping less developed countries to the bone?
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Is the issue location? I can imagine a reluctance among some young doctors to take a job in rural Lincolnshire or Wales.
Ok a couple of caveats here: I don't know about GP training which will be greater and I am looking at many decades ago, but trainee doctors went to wherever the roles were. You were expected to move to a new hospital in a new area. For instance my wife went from Aberdeen to Leicester to London (St Georges). I know Foxy went in the reverse direction, ending up in Leicester from London.
That's still the case. My partner does not work in Edinburgh, I've got friends in Moray, Skye, Chateau Lait.
FPT - I think UK supply chains and trading systems are highly efficient, but fragile.
The whole system probably goes down with stock and food unavailable inside 48-72 hours with any major disruption. Leading to civil disorder.
There's no resilience since no-one grows, stores or cooks anything anymore. So we'd go hungry very quickly.
Nah, one thing the pandemic shows is that retailers can adapt, look how all the supermarkets scaled up their home deliveries at the end of March 2020/start of April 2020.
If the supermarkets lost internet access, their tills would work just fine as they have a server on site.
What wouldn’t work are local card payments and the stock control system, which would see the place empty in a couple of days.
In that scenario, you want to have cash.
Their home delivery servers *should* have at two different internet suppliers plus Starlink in the data centre, but getting the order data to the warehouses and then the delivery drivers could prove more problematic.
Supermarkets and department stores really should look at Starlink backups at retail and warehouse locations, that’s the sort of thing their IT teams will be working through as a result of yesterday’s outage.
It's annoying to say this but given that any land based backup route is going to follow the same path, Starlink is probably an essential backup connection...
What’s annoying about it, unless your shop is in the middle of a big mall and you can’t find anywhere to stick the dish?
Low-orbit satellite broadband is a game-changer for applications such as backup connections for critical infrastructure and large businesses. It’s a lot easier and cheaper to stick a dish on the roof, than to get a second fibre internet connection that doesn’t have a potential single point of failure with the primary.
Oh the annoying bit is giving a Monopoly money - beyond that yep it’s essential backup if you can’t move your staff to where a connection still exists
It’s not a monopoly - just first to market for LEO, low latency.
Kuiper are taking orders already - their service start should be next year IIRC. You can also buy lower tier solutions (more latency, less bandwidth) such as OneWeb, right now.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
We have something similar in pharmacy. We are at the limit for placements through the course - we just cannot find any more. Now at the moment the nation is probably producing enough pharmacists.
For medicine, the government needs to stump up money invest in training places. It WILL pay off in the end. What you want is a glut of medics to drive the salaries down...
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Is the issue location? I can imagine a reluctance among some young doctors to take a job in rural Lincolnshire or Wales.
Ok a couple of caveats here: I don't know about GP training which will be greater and I am looking at many decades ago, but trainee doctors went to wherever the roles were. You were expected to move to a new hospital in a new area. For instance my wife went from Aberdeen to Leicester to London (St Georges). I know Foxy went in the reverse direction, ending up in Leicester from London.
That’s still the case. For example, a Foundation Dr in the North might be placed at James Cook in Teesside, Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle, or the RVI in Newcastle, amongst others.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
It takes genius to create a shortage of GPs and a shortage of jobs for GPs at the same time.
I think we're producing enough doctors but don't have enough Foxys to train up people like my partner.
It would take a brave politician to reduce current provision in order to generate more capacity in 5+ years time.
When this was discussed before, it was pointed out that there might be spare capacity in the Philippines - which acts as a giant training centre for medics for the world.
Send our proto-medics there for training?
We kind of already do. Lots of NHS staff, doctors and nurses are immigrants from the Philippines or India (and since Brexit, not so much Europe). You can spin this as a good or bad thing depending on your politics but beware, the zeitgeist is changing. Are we nobly supporting countries and people less well off, or stripping less developed countries to the bone?
Indeed. My idea is to expand medical training, using overseas, while expanding at home.
Why not produce a surplus of doctors and nurses in the UK?
For one thing, the population pyramid is collapsing worldwide. At the same time, we are running low on really poor countries. As countries get richer, one of the first things they want more of is medicine. We’ve seen the same thing in the Far East, Japan, China, South America and now Africa.
It is quite possible that in 20 years, there won’t be a supply of medics we can bring into the country as a cheap option.
The UK is very good at innovation. We punch well above our weight in research. Yet successive governments keep effectively cutting university funding and introducing hostile policies.
But innovation isn’t enough. Going from innovation to market is hard. Innovators may look to larger markets (US, EU), particularly in areas where regulation is complex (which it needs to be in pharma).
We have plenty of creative, talented, people, but lack the necessary cadre of competent middle to senior management.
The universities are just about the only world class thing we have left and yet Phillipson seems to be totally asleep at the wheel as they collapse.
Has she said one thing about unis since becoming education sec?
But seems she still has some spare time as she is running to be deputy - a job that presumably involves some hours a week away from her actual day job.
On Uni finance, Bath has been pretty robust but can hear the system creaking everywhere. Whether it was no spare calculators in exam rooms, to stripping back admin staff to support examinations at one end, or the announcement yesterday of a voluntary exit scheme (not seen since the heady days of covid) you know that while we've been ok so far, belts are running out of holes to tighten to.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
We have something similar in pharmacy. We are at the limit for placements through the course - we just cannot find any more. Now at the moment the nation is probably producing enough pharmacists.
For medicine, the government needs to stump up money invest in training places. It WILL pay off in the end. What you want is a glut of medics to drive the salaries down...
Interesting about pharmacy. When I qualified, back in the v. early 60's there were dozens of jobs advertised but two Schools of Pharmacy closed, and twenty years later another Uni backed out. Now it seems there's a pharmacy department in dozens of universities.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Is the issue location? I can imagine a reluctance among some young doctors to take a job in rural Lincolnshire or Wales.
Ok a couple of caveats here: I don't know about GP training which will be greater and I am looking at many decades ago, but trainee doctors went to wherever the roles were. You were expected to move to a new hospital in a new area. For instance my wife went from Aberdeen to Leicester to London (St Georges). I know Foxy went in the reverse direction, ending up in Leicester from London.
That’s still the case. For example, a Foundation Dr in the North might be placed at James Cook in Teesside, Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle, or the RVI in Newcastle, amongst others.
The NHS training, recruitment and staffing systems appears to have been designed by people who thought that the Imperial Japanese Navy were a bunch of softies.
Strangely, if you treat your staff like a 19th Cent. mill owner, you get poor industrial relations.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Is the issue location? I can imagine a reluctance among some young doctors to take a job in rural Lincolnshire or Wales.
Ok a couple of caveats here: I don't know about GP training which will be greater and I am looking at many decades ago, but trainee doctors went to wherever the roles were. You were expected to move to a new hospital in a new area. For instance my wife went from Aberdeen to Leicester to London (St Georges). I know Foxy went in the reverse direction, ending up in Leicester from London.
And another complaint is the very short notice junior doctors (or so-called resident doctors, because heaven knows the title was the problem) were given. Maybe just two days that your next job was a hundred miles away. Computer timetabling is hard, or not used, or something.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
It takes genius to create a shortage of GPs and a shortage of jobs for GPs at the same time.
I think we're producing enough doctors but don't have enough Foxys to train up people like my partner.
It would take a brave politician to reduce current provision in order to generate more capacity in 5+ years time.
When this was discussed before, it was pointed out that there might be spare capacity in the Philippines - which acts as a giant training centre for medics for the world.
Send our proto-medics there for training?
We kind of already do. Lots of NHS staff, doctors and nurses are immigrants from the Philippines or India (and since Brexit, not so much Europe). You can spin this as a good or bad thing depending on your politics but beware, the zeitgeist is changing. Are we nobly supporting countries and people less well off, or stripping less developed countries to the bone?
Indeed. My idea is to expand medical training, using overseas, while expanding at home.
Why not produce a surplus of doctors and nurses in the UK?
For one thing, the population pyramid is collapsing worldwide. At the same time, we are running low on really poor countries. As countries get richer, one of the first things they want more of is medicine. We’ve seen the same thing in the Far East, Japan, China, South America and now Africa.
It is quite possible that in 20 years, there won’t be a supply of medics we can bring into the country as a cheap option.
It’ll be a while until India and the Philippines are cleared out of medical staff, but yes there’s a need to make overseas partnerships to bring in a pipeline of qualified people until the NHS can get itself together on training places.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Is the issue location? I can imagine a reluctance among some young doctors to take a job in rural Lincolnshire or Wales.
Certainly that's part of it. The SW has struggled for healthcare for decades. While living in rural Cornwall might appeal to well off Londoners nearing retirement, a run down pharmacy in Bude, Tavistock or Camelford is not enticing to a newly minted pharmacy graduate.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Is the issue location? I can imagine a reluctance among some young doctors to take a job in rural Lincolnshire or Wales.
Ok a couple of caveats here: I don't know about GP training which will be greater and I am looking at many decades ago, but trainee doctors went to wherever the roles were. You were expected to move to a new hospital in a new area. For instance my wife went from Aberdeen to Leicester to London (St Georges). I know Foxy went in the reverse direction, ending up in Leicester from London.
And another complaint is the very short notice junior doctors (or so-called resident doctors, because heaven knows the title was the problem) were given. Maybe just two days that your next job was a hundred miles away. Computer timetabling is hard, or not used, or something.
It wasn't so bad when hospitals had ancillary accommodation for 'junior' doctors and nurses.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
We have something similar in pharmacy. We are at the limit for placements through the course - we just cannot find any more. Now at the moment the nation is probably producing enough pharmacists.
For medicine, the government needs to stump up money invest in training places. It WILL pay off in the end. What you want is a glut of medics to drive the salaries down...
Interesting about pharmacy. When I qualified, back in the v. early 60's there were dozens of jobs advertised but two Schools of Pharmacy closed, and twenty years later another Uni backed out. Now it seems there's a pharmacy department in dozens of universities.
I've lost count but we are approaching 40 nationally now. If we are not careful we will 'bust' again - start producing too many graduates, driving salaries back down and reducing interest in studying pharmacy... Then your poor old admission's tutor will get it in the neck...
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Is the issue location? I can imagine a reluctance among some young doctors to take a job in rural Lincolnshire or Wales.
Certainly that's part of it. The SW has struggled for healthcare for decades. While living in rural Cornwall might appeal to well off Londoners nearing retirement, a run down pharmacy in Bude, Tavistock or Camelford is not enticing to a newly minted pharmacy graduate.
Depends on who you market it to.
There was a Scottish island, a while back, that was looking for a GP. IIRC it ended up as story in the Telegraph. Which got a bunch of candidates as a result - Good salary + free, large house in an unspoilt rural paradise was extremely tempting for some families, it seemed.
Equally, there are people out there who would go to a run down area out of a sense of mission.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
We have something similar in pharmacy. We are at the limit for placements through the course - we just cannot find any more. Now at the moment the nation is probably producing enough pharmacists.
For medicine, the government needs to stump up money invest in training places. It WILL pay off in the end. What you want is a glut of medics to drive the salaries down...
Training placements are a massive problem everywhere. A bit down the age scale, T Levels (announced back when TM was PM) have never really taken off, in part because colleges find it so difficult to get the required 45 days of industrial experience for students.
O/T if anyone wants a very interesting long read over their lunch or whatever. A good perspective on Trump from a former top Chinese journalist who lives in the US now. I like his idea that you could switch Xi and Trump and nobody would really notice the difference.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Is the issue location? I can imagine a reluctance among some young doctors to take a job in rural Lincolnshire or Wales.
Certainly that's part of it. The SW has struggled for healthcare for decades. While living in rural Cornwall might appeal to well off Londoners nearing retirement, a run down pharmacy in Bude, Tavistock or Camelford is not enticing to a newly minted pharmacy graduate.
Depends on who you market it to.
There was a Scottish island, a while back, that was looking for a GP. IIRC it ended up as story in the Telegraph. Which got a bunch of candidates as a result - Good salary + free, large house in an unspoilt rural paradise was extremely tempting for some families, it seemed.
Equally, there are people out there who would go to a run down area out of a sense of mission.
Totally agree. However most healthcare providers are limited in what they can offer. So locum rates for pharmacy can be amazing in the run down towns of Devon and Cornwall (think Bideford in winter).
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Isn’t the issue there with the number of NHS training places for junior doctors, which don’t line up with the number of university medicine graduates?
Imagine if such a scandal occurred in other fields:
Engineering grads who can't get engineering jobs Science grads who can't get science jobs Arts grads who can't get a job as an Artist in Residence History grads who can't get a job presenting a TV series
The UK is very good at innovation. We punch well above our weight in research. Yet successive governments keep effectively cutting university funding and introducing hostile policies.
But innovation isn’t enough. Going from innovation to market is hard. Innovators may look to larger markets (US, EU), particularly in areas where regulation is complex (which it needs to be in pharma).
We have plenty of creative, talented, people, but lack the necessary cadre of competent middle to senior management.
The universities are just about the only world class thing we have left and yet Phillipson seems to be totally asleep at the wheel as they collapse.
Has she said one thing about unis since becoming education sec?
But seems she still has some spare time as she is running to be deputy - a job that presumably involves some hours a week away from her actual day job.
On Uni finance, Bath has been pretty robust but can hear the system creaking everywhere. Whether it was no spare calculators in exam rooms, to stripping back admin staff to support examinations at one end, or the announcement yesterday of a voluntary exit scheme (not seen since the heady days of covid) you know that while we've been ok so far, belts are running out of holes to tighten to.
For someone who has been watching the sector for a while (one of the projects I worked on a while back was overseas recruitment for a Russell Group uni) I’m frankly surprised this is your first round of voluntary exit schemes.
Elsewhere they’ve ran them so often there is no-one left willing to volunteer.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
Millions of Brits unemployed or on benefits yet the chippie is hiring a migrant on a visa. Something is broken.
Whole feckin country is broken , they seem to have unlimited money to hose out for any ailment real or imagined. If it had to come out of the dumb MP's wages they would have benefits cut pronto.
Just to point out that the country is not remotely close to being broken; that this is all far fetched nonsense; that in respect of wealth generation we are doing less well than we might but are comparable with other large wealthy countries; that most people live extraordinarily contented, peaceful and decent lives in at least modest prosperity; and that to be born in the UK is to have drawn a prize winning ticket in the lottery of life.
The 'Britain is Broken' brigade should get out more. Have a chat with people I know who have been a doctor in Mauretania, a social scientist in rural Uganda, a resident in modern Iran, an aid worker with refugees in Chad....
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Isn’t the issue there with the number of NHS training places for junior doctors, which don’t line up with the number of university medicine graduates?
Imagine if such a scandal occurred in other fields:
Engineering grads who can't get engineering jobs Science grads who can't get science jobs Arts grads who can't get a job as an Artist in Residence History grads who can't get a job presenting a TV series
Welcome to the real world, med school comrades!
The problem with med school grads is that the government is a monopoly employer, so it’s a failure of government if the universities are churning out graduates who have no training places.
The UK is very good at innovation. We punch well above our weight in research. Yet successive governments keep effectively cutting university funding and introducing hostile policies.
But innovation isn’t enough. Going from innovation to market is hard. Innovators may look to larger markets (US, EU), particularly in areas where regulation is complex (which it needs to be in pharma).
We have plenty of creative, talented, people, but lack the necessary cadre of competent middle to senior management.
The universities are just about the only world class thing we have left and yet Phillipson seems to be totally asleep at the wheel as they collapse.
Has she said one thing about unis since becoming education sec?
But seems she still has some spare time as she is running to be deputy - a job that presumably involves some hours a week away from her actual day job.
On Uni finance, Bath has been pretty robust but can hear the system creaking everywhere. Whether it was no spare calculators in exam rooms, to stripping back admin staff to support examinations at one end, or the announcement yesterday of a voluntary exit scheme (not seen since the heady days of covid) you know that while we've been ok so far, belts are running out of holes to tighten to.
For someone who has been watching the sector for a while (one of the projects I worked on a while back was overseas recruitment for a Russell Group uni) I’m frankly surprised this is your first round of voluntary exit schemes.
Elsewhere they’ve ran them so often there is no-one left willing to volunteer.
Its not the first - its the first since Covid. Uni's have always had a problem with academics who have stopped being research active (or at least successful) but carry on turning up, taking the (usually large) salary as senior lecturers/profs etc but don't do much of anything else. Its hard for unis to sack people. About the only power HoD's or Dean's have is to start piling up teaching and admin to drive them out.
So our current scheme is branded as helping us 'refresh our workforce'.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Isn’t the issue there with the number of NHS training places for junior doctors, which don’t line up with the number of university medicine graduates?
Imagine if such a scandal occurred in other fields:
Engineering grads who can't get engineering jobs Science grads who can't get science jobs Arts grads who can't get a job as an Artist in Residence History grads who can't get a job presenting a TV series
Welcome to the real world, med school comrades!
Well, I feel sorry for those grads too.
The medicine thing is stupid because the government has command and control over the NHS in a way it does not the rest of the economy/education system. In this case the damage to the individuals and society as a whole is largely avoidable.
Doctors get paid well, no doubt. But you have a very large number of highly qualified, hard working and smart young people saddled with massive debt , unable to use their skills for the wider good and facing unemployment - and we know that extended un/under employment has decades long impacts on people.
Microsoft have been shits for years. You end up stuck with Windows because your employer almost certainly requires it. But its *awful*. The joy of 5 years of running my own business is buying my own stuff. And despite having to integrate to various client systems from across Europe, MacOS works fine.
Microsoft do an amazing job supporting a vast array of different hardware. This is much more difficult than supporting hardware that you design yourself, and control.
Yes, they make some baffling business decisions. But don't underestimate the complexity of what they do, even with standards.
Mmmm. Whatever the reason, running Windows means losing time dealing with random x has stopped working y has stopped loading issues. Having to look up endless error codes when that software won't install. Trying fix after fix after fix to make it work.
Then you give up, buy a Mac and never look back. And I write this as someone who was very negative about Apple for a long time.
Oddly enough, I have very little problem with Windows, and have not for a good few years. Mind you, I am not doing anything too complex with it nowadays. It just works.
The UK is very good at innovation. We punch well above our weight in research. Yet successive governments keep effectively cutting university funding and introducing hostile policies.
But innovation isn’t enough. Going from innovation to market is hard. Innovators may look to larger markets (US, EU), particularly in areas where regulation is complex (which it needs to be in pharma).
We have plenty of creative, talented, people, but lack the necessary cadre of competent middle to senior management.
The universities are just about the only world class thing we have left and yet Phillipson seems to be totally asleep at the wheel as they collapse.
Has she said one thing about unis since becoming education sec?
But seems she still has some spare time as she is running to be deputy - a job that presumably involves some hours a week away from her actual day job.
On Uni finance, Bath has been pretty robust but can hear the system creaking everywhere. Whether it was no spare calculators in exam rooms, to stripping back admin staff to support examinations at one end, or the announcement yesterday of a voluntary exit scheme (not seen since the heady days of covid) you know that while we've been ok so far, belts are running out of holes to tighten to.
For someone who has been watching the sector for a while (one of the projects I worked on a while back was overseas recruitment for a Russell Group uni) I’m frankly surprised this is your first round of voluntary exit schemes.
Elsewhere they’ve ran them so often there is no-one left willing to volunteer.
Happy Last Ever Patch Tuesday for Windows 10 users who have not sold their soul to Microsoft for an extra year of updates Day.
In a world where computers now regularly last for 5-8 years without too much trouble in domestic environments, this probably goes down as one of Microsoft’s worst decisions of all time.
When they launched W10, the idea was that it would be basically the last Windows O/S, with everything afterwards just being updates.
W11 added little new apart from adverts, telemetry, and forcing Microsoft Account on everyone. It’s purely a commercial decision to get rid of W10, at the cost of hundreds of millions of computers. The sort of thing that antitrust regulators should be all over.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
Millions of Brits unemployed or on benefits yet the chippie is hiring a migrant on a visa. Something is broken.
Whole feckin country is broken , they seem to have unlimited money to hose out for any ailment real or imagined. If it had to come out of the dumb MP's wages they would have benefits cut pronto.
Just to point out that the country is not remotely close to being broken; that this is all far fetched nonsense; that in respect of wealth generation we are doing less well than we might but are comparable with other large wealthy countries; that most people live extraordinarily contented, peaceful and decent lives in at least modest prosperity; and that to be born in the UK is to have drawn a prize winning ticket in the lottery of life.
The 'Britain is Broken' brigade should get out more. Have a chat with people I know who have been a doctor in Mauretania, a social scientist in rural Uganda, a resident in modern Iran, an aid worker with refugees in Chad....
'Broken Britain' is a meme that is popular right now but anecdote is usually revealing. Such as "The NHS is terrible" followed then by tales of excellent, timely care. Its a bit like how perception of crime is far worse than the reality (aside of warzone of shoplifting in Leon's local shops).
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.
I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Isn’t the issue there with the number of NHS training places for junior doctors, which don’t line up with the number of university medicine graduates?
Imagine if such a scandal occurred in other fields:
Engineering grads who can't get engineering jobs Science grads who can't get science jobs Arts grads who can't get a job as an Artist in Residence History grads who can't get a job presenting a TV series
Welcome to the real world, med school comrades!
I think we all agree with that, after all I'm not a medic either. Just married to one. BUT that wasn't the issue. The issue was the statement that a medic can just get a job by going somewhere less desirable or for less money. As demonstrated that isn't necessarily the case.
For all its flaws being a medic is more secure and better paid than most jobs. That doesn't mean one should make assumptions about how easy it is to get a job. It isn't necessarily.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
Millions of Brits unemployed or on benefits yet the chippie is hiring a migrant on a visa. Something is broken.
Whole feckin country is broken , they seem to have unlimited money to hose out for any ailment real or imagined. If it had to come out of the dumb MP's wages they would have benefits cut pronto.
Just to point out that the country is not remotely close to being broken; that this is all far fetched nonsense; that in respect of wealth generation we are doing less well than we might but are comparable with other large wealthy countries; that most people live extraordinarily contented, peaceful and decent lives in at least modest prosperity; and that to be born in the UK is to have drawn a prize winning ticket in the lottery of life.
The 'Britain is Broken' brigade should get out more. Have a chat with people I know who have been a doctor in Mauretania, a social scientist in rural Uganda, a resident in modern Iran, an aid worker with refugees in Chad....
Sure, Not just in this country, but in a lot of the world, the best time to be born was yesterday. I could not fault the treatment I got for my gashed forehead and broken ribs in the Luton & Dunstable. People do recover from naturally from such injuries, but I could have been in a hell of a lot more pain.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
Millions of Brits unemployed or on benefits yet the chippie is hiring a migrant on a visa. Something is broken.
Whole feckin country is broken , they seem to have unlimited money to hose out for any ailment real or imagined. If it had to come out of the dumb MP's wages they would have benefits cut pronto.
Just to point out that the country is not remotely close to being broken; that this is all far fetched nonsense; that in respect of wealth generation we are doing less well than we might but are comparable with other large wealthy countries; that most people live extraordinarily contented, peaceful and decent lives in at least modest prosperity; and that to be born in the UK is to have drawn a prize winning ticket in the lottery of life.
The 'Britain is Broken' brigade should get out more. Have a chat with people I know who have been a doctor in Mauretania, a social scientist in rural Uganda, a resident in modern Iran, an aid worker with refugees in Chad....
'Broken Britain' is a meme that is popular right now but anecdote is usually revealing. Such as "The NHS is terrible" followed then by tales of excellent, timely care. Its a bit like how perception of crime is far worse than the reality (aside of warzone of shoplifting in Leon's local shops).
We remember the bad bits, and expect the good bits. Something just working is unremarkable; something not working annoys and sticks in the memory.
The Internet is also a problem; people (and trolls, and bots...) highlight their terrible experiences, and might make them seem typical. Five people complaining about bad service online get heard; the thousands who had acceptable service do not.
The UK is very good at innovation. We punch well above our weight in research. Yet successive governments keep effectively cutting university funding and introducing hostile policies.
But innovation isn’t enough. Going from innovation to market is hard. Innovators may look to larger markets (US, EU), particularly in areas where regulation is complex (which it needs to be in pharma).
We have plenty of creative, talented, people, but lack the necessary cadre of competent middle to senior management.
The universities are just about the only world class thing we have left and yet Phillipson seems to be totally asleep at the wheel as they collapse.
Has she said one thing about unis since becoming education sec?
But seems she still has some spare time as she is running to be deputy - a job that presumably involves some hours a week away from her actual day job.
On Uni finance, Bath has been pretty robust but can hear the system creaking everywhere. Whether it was no spare calculators in exam rooms, to stripping back admin staff to support examinations at one end, or the announcement yesterday of a voluntary exit scheme (not seen since the heady days of covid) you know that while we've been ok so far, belts are running out of holes to tighten to.
For someone who has been watching the sector for a while (one of the projects I worked on a while back was overseas recruitment for a Russell Group uni) I’m frankly surprised this is your first round of voluntary exit schemes.
Elsewhere they’ve ran them so often there is no-one left willing to volunteer.
Its not the first - its the first since Covid. Uni's have always had a problem with academics who have stopped being research active (or at least successful) but carry on turning up, taking the (usually large) salary as senior lecturers/profs etc but don't do much of anything else. Its hard for unis to sack people. About the only power HoD's or Dean's have is to start piling up teaching and admin to drive them out.
So our current scheme is branded as helping us 'refresh our workforce'.
My friend in the Uni sector was looking for their first job 20+ years ago, they said back then almost everyone waiting to be interviewed was more qualified and published than most of the interview panel.
Happy Last Ever Patch Tuesday for Windows 10 users who have not sold their soul to Microsoft for an extra year of updates Day.
In a world where computers now regularly last for 5-8 years without too much trouble in domestic environments, this probably goes down as one of Microsoft’s worst decisions of all time.
When they launched W10, the idea was that it would be basically the last Windows O/S, with everything afterwards just being updates.
W11 added little new apart from adverts, telemetry, and forcing Microsoft Account on everyone. It’s purely a commercial decision to get rid of W10, at the cost of hundreds of millions of computers. The sort of thing that antitrust regulators should be all over.
Sticking with W10 - wish me luck
A courageous decision. In the long term anyway. It's not irrational if your kit is OK, as there's some sense in seeing if Microsoft backtrack some more, but if I were you I'd earmark six months down the line to do something else about it.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
Millions of Brits unemployed or on benefits yet the chippie is hiring a migrant on a visa. Something is broken.
Whole feckin country is broken , they seem to have unlimited money to hose out for any ailment real or imagined. If it had to come out of the dumb MP's wages they would have benefits cut pronto.
Just to point out that the country is not remotely close to being broken; that this is all far fetched nonsense; that in respect of wealth generation we are doing less well than we might but are comparable with other large wealthy countries; that most people live extraordinarily contented, peaceful and decent lives in at least modest prosperity; and that to be born in the UK is to have drawn a prize winning ticket in the lottery of life.
The 'Britain is Broken' brigade should get out more. Have a chat with people I know who have been a doctor in Mauretania, a social scientist in rural Uganda, a resident in modern Iran, an aid worker with refugees in Chad....
Which 'Britain is Broken' brigade ?
The current one or the one we heard from before July 2024 ?
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
Millions of Brits unemployed or on benefits yet the chippie is hiring a migrant on a visa. Something is broken.
Whole feckin country is broken , they seem to have unlimited money to hose out for any ailment real or imagined. If it had to come out of the dumb MP's wages they would have benefits cut pronto.
Just to point out that the country is not remotely close to being broken; that this is all far fetched nonsense; that in respect of wealth generation we are doing less well than we might but are comparable with other large wealthy countries; that most people live extraordinarily contented, peaceful and decent lives in at least modest prosperity; and that to be born in the UK is to have drawn a prize winning ticket in the lottery of life.
The 'Britain is Broken' brigade should get out more. Have a chat with people I know who have been a doctor in Mauretania, a social scientist in rural Uganda, a resident in modern Iran, an aid worker with refugees in Chad....
'Broken Britain' is a meme that is popular right now but anecdote is usually revealing. Such as "The NHS is terrible" followed then by tales of excellent, timely care. Its a bit like how perception of crime is far worse than the reality (aside of warzone of shoplifting in Leon's local shops).
We remember the bad bits, and expect the good bits. Something just working is unremarkable; something not working annoys and sticks in the memory.
The Internet is also a problem; people (and trolls, and bots...) highlight their terrible experiences, and might make them seem typical. Five people complaining about bad service online get heard; the thousands who had acceptable service do not.
Britain isn't broken. But we're at a major inflexion point in the global economy, outside of a large trade block, running large fiscal and balance of payments deficits, and with debt >100% of GDP. And suffering persistent low growth.
So we're in greater danger of becoming broken than at any time in the last forty years, I think.
It's really, really worrying to find myself on the same side as Richard Burgon and Michael Gove. It feels like the universe is pranking me by making total idiots say sensible things.
Happy Last Ever Patch Tuesday for Windows 10 users who have not sold their soul to Microsoft for an extra year of updates Day.
In a world where computers now regularly last for 5-8 years without too much trouble in domestic environments, this probably goes down as one of Microsoft’s worst decisions of all time.
When they launched W10, the idea was that it would be basically the last Windows O/S, with everything afterwards just being updates.
W11 added little new apart from adverts, telemetry, and forcing Microsoft Account on everyone. It’s purely a commercial decision to get rid of W10, at the cost of hundreds of millions of computers. The sort of thing that antitrust regulators should be all over.
Sticking with W10 - wish me luck
Sticking with Linux - ditto...
It is all good until someone (yes, you, DEFRA) produces a macro-laden spreadsheet in Excel that you are supposed to fill in. Curse them and all their works.
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
Millions of Brits unemployed or on benefits yet the chippie is hiring a migrant on a visa. Something is broken.
Whole feckin country is broken , they seem to have unlimited money to hose out for any ailment real or imagined. If it had to come out of the dumb MP's wages they would have benefits cut pronto.
Just to point out that the country is not remotely close to being broken; that this is all far fetched nonsense; that in respect of wealth generation we are doing less well than we might but are comparable with other large wealthy countries; that most people live extraordinarily contented, peaceful and decent lives in at least modest prosperity; and that to be born in the UK is to have drawn a prize winning ticket in the lottery of life.
The 'Britain is Broken' brigade should get out more. Have a chat with people I know who have been a doctor in Mauretania, a social scientist in rural Uganda, a resident in modern Iran, an aid worker with refugees in Chad....
'Broken Britain' is a meme that is popular right now but anecdote is usually revealing. Such as "The NHS is terrible" followed then by tales of excellent, timely care. Its a bit like how perception of crime is far worse than the reality (aside of warzone of shoplifting in Leon's local shops).
We remember the bad bits, and expect the good bits. Something just working is unremarkable; something not working annoys and sticks in the memory.
The Internet is also a problem; people (and trolls, and bots...) highlight their terrible experiences, and might make them seem typical. Five people complaining about bad service online get heard; the thousands who had acceptable service do not.
Britain isn't broken. But we're at a major inflexion point in the global economy, outside of a large trade block, running large fiscal and balance of payments deficits, and with debt >100% of GDP. And suffering persistent low growth.
So we're in greater danger of becoming broken than at any time in the last forty years, I think.
And the kicker is that the more we conclude that everything really is broken, the more likely we are to do panic reactions, so the more likely we are to really break the country.
Instances where we have already done that are left as exercises for the reader.
Comments
There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.
Specialists are more complex in that there are fewer candidates for fewer roles
For example I probably have about 20 people in the UK who do what I do (and about 400 who aspire to do what I do). And if you go even more specialist I have 2 competitors globally and between us we control 80% of the market.
Mentally I belong to the pre smartphone era even though I have one. But for some of the smartphone generation it alone is your: bank, all other financial services including all transactions, all visual and spoken media, retailer, library, newspapers, communications, workplace, social life and much else.
What would happen? And it seems to me that Murphy's great principle applies: if it can happen, sometimes it will. I wonder what the government's risk register has to say about it, and what then plan is?
Sky News published this just five minutes ago:-
Getting a job becomes harder with fewer vacancies - official figures
There was an unexpected increase in the unemployment rate, despite a record number of people over 65 being in work.
https://news.sky.com/story/getting-a-job-became-harder-with-fewer-vacancies-official-figures-13449823
They've proved, up to a point, that massive state intervention across all aspects of the economy can work (though note that alongside that, they also allow/foster cutthroat market competition).
Whether their model is sustainable is an open question. Whatever it is, it's not communism (except they've hung on to the vile authoritarianism that goes along with communism).
Having left their post/office early.
What the U.K. it utterly terrible at is this -
There is a quasi-religious belief that investing in “productionising” a technology is immoral. Rather than finacialisation.
If there’s a serious bug found, MS are probably going to have no choice but to push a fix. There’s probably a group of hackers already sitting on the exploit, biding their time until they can use it to maximum effect.
Has she said one thing about unis since becoming education sec?
But seems she still has some spare time as she is running to be deputy - a job that presumably involves some hours a week away from her actual day job.
Not now. They tend to know one area brilliantly well, but if they know about wills and IHT, they can't tell a fingerprint from the rule against hearsay, and unless they specialise in litigation have never once stepped ina court.
Inevitable I suppose, but I miss the old characters.
Not my department, but two questions spring to mind.
One is that the people who could be doing that are doing other things instead. If so, what and why?
Another is whether it's part of the (lack of) Captain Mainwaring problem. We've got rid of many of the small-scale management jobs, and removed independence from many of the rest. How do you get good at big-scale management without doing something smaller first? Assuming AI takes off, that could make things worse, strengthening the illusion that a single genius can run everything (and take all the rewards) from their hollowed out volcanic lair.
He’s merely saying he specialises, with some success, in a career which relatively few seek out - 400 wanting 20 jobs
If you want a brag, take my job. I consistently write travel for half a living. Probably 300 people in the UK do that, tops, yet 3,000,000 would LOVE to do it, and 300,000 try
@LucRaghallaigh
·
7m
Delighted to launch The Hitch. The New Statesman’s pseudonymous gossip columnist, serving the inside scoop:
The Hitch
@TheStaggers
·
3h
There's a new gossip in town.
https://x.com/LucRaghallaigh/status/1978016186844475784
Chalkautopen one up for Sleepy Joe.https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/article/explainer/coronavirus-how-different-countries-supported-unemployed
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/article/explainer/coronavirus-how-countries-supported-wages-during-pandemic
I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.
Of course large scale fraud is now on something of a different scale under the new administration.
But yes may cause confusion although C Hitch is no longer able to file copy.
@ElectionMapsUK
·
12m
Westminster Voting Intention:
RFM: 27% (=)
LAB: 20% (=)
CON: 17% (=)
LDM: 16% (-1)
GRN: 13% (+1)
SNP: 3% (-1)
Via
@YouGov
, 12-13 Oct.
Changes w/ 5-6 Oct.
Full results:
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/overview/survey-results
If they weren’t directly affected yesterday, they are belatedly realising they could be next.
It would take a brave politician to reduce current provision in order to generate more capacity in 5+ years time.
Our Government should unequivocally condemn it because it will cause even more suffering for the Palestinian people who have already endured so much.
DYOR. I'm getting a mix of Scottish/English anecdotes and don't have more than a vague sense. She comes out with more acronyms than Dura_Ace.
Certainly, it’s not been tried before.
https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1222441947861864449
It's an old one 29/1/2020, but too many tweets and all that
Send our proto-medics there for training?
BREAKING: Israel's military says it carried out a shooting after "several suspects" crossed the line of withdrawal and approached forces operating in northern Gaza.
https://x.com/SkyNews/status/1978022901866529085
Meanwhile, the Green Party are up and running with a dynamic new leader who can speak in a more compelling way than Magic Grandpa or Zarah lunacy.
Your Party = ALBA
A reminder of how well the UK construction sector is currently doing:
September data suggested that the UK construction sector faced pressure on multiple fronts as residential, commercial and civil engineering work all continued to decrease at solid rates. Lower volumes of overall construction output have been recorded since January, although the latest reduction was the slowest for three months and the downturn in new orders was the softest so far in 2025.
Business activity expectations for the year ahead were among the lowest since the end of 2022, suggesting that construction companies remained cautious about the near-term outlook and have yet to see a turning point on the horizon. Some firms hope for a boost from lower borrowing costs and noted new sales pipelines in areas such as energy security markets and infrastructure projects. However, many survey respondents reported caution among clients ahead of the Autumn Budget and a general reluctance to commit to major capital expenditure projects against a subdued domestic economic backdrop.
Weak business optimism, shrinking workloads and robust cost pressures once again led to lower employment numbers across the construction sector. Lower staffing levels have now been recorded for nine months in a row, which is the longest period of job shedding since the pandemic.
https://www.pmi.spglobal.com/Public/Home/PressRelease/f6ee72e7df344e659e43a07f012737b2
It’s a global business that isn’t large enough for the big generalists to care about and is too complicated for the local players.
So my employer books about $7-8m a year keeps half of it for its shareholders / operating costs and pays my team out of the rest.
Driving the Ottomans back to the Turkish border was, I suppose, OK; picking over the corpse with the French like a pair of hungry vultures wasn't.
PS On reflection, I suppose the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam was, in general, a Good Thing.
Kuiper are taking orders already - their service start should be next year IIRC. You can also buy lower tier solutions (more latency, less bandwidth) such as OneWeb, right now.
For medicine, the government needs to
stump up moneyinvest in training places. It WILL pay off in the end. What you want is a glut of medics to drive the salaries down...https://x.com/WatchdogTh96012/status/1977539015189405863
Why not produce a surplus of doctors and nurses in the UK?
For one thing, the population pyramid is collapsing worldwide. At the same time, we are running low on really poor countries. As countries get richer, one of the first things they want more of is medicine. We’ve seen the same thing in the Far East, Japan, China, South America and now Africa.
It is quite possible that in 20 years, there won’t be a supply of medics we can bring into the country as a cheap option.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/keir-starmer-address-nation-1230pm-36064031
Newspaper of record.
Strangely, if you treat your staff like a 19th Cent. mill owner, you get poor industrial relations.
There was a Scottish island, a while back, that was looking for a GP. IIRC it ended up as story in the Telegraph. Which got a bunch of candidates as a result - Good salary + free, large house in an unspoilt rural paradise was extremely tempting for some families, it seemed.
Equally, there are people out there who would go to a run down area out of a sense of mission.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/14/wang-jian-china-journalist-reports-united-states-donald-trump-xi-jinping
Turns out that counting words is a much better lie-detection tool than looking for physical markers of stress.
See this podcast from ten years ago.
Episode webpage: http://allusionist.prx.org/2015/10/criminallusionist/
Engineering grads who can't get engineering jobs
Science grads who can't get science jobs
Arts grads who can't get a job as an Artist in Residence
History grads who can't get a job presenting a TV series
Welcome to the real world, med school comrades!
Elsewhere they’ve ran them so often there is no-one left willing to volunteer.
The 'Britain is Broken' brigade should get out more. Have a chat with people I know who have been a doctor in Mauretania, a social scientist in rural Uganda, a resident in modern Iran, an aid worker with refugees in Chad....
So our current scheme is branded as helping us 'refresh our workforce'.
The medicine thing is stupid because the government has command and control over the NHS in a way it does not the rest of the economy/education system. In this case the damage to the individuals and society as a whole is largely avoidable.
Doctors get paid well, no doubt. But you have a very large number of highly qualified, hard working and smart young people saddled with massive debt , unable to use their skills for the wider good and facing unemployment - and we know that extended un/under employment has decades long impacts on people.
For all its flaws being a medic is more secure and better paid than most jobs. That doesn't mean one should make assumptions about how easy it is to get a job. It isn't necessarily.
@RichardBurgon
ID cards are a threat to civil liberties, to our data security and risk people’s private info being handed to US tech giants for profit.
They’re also a total waste of time and money when the government should be focused on the real priority: tackling the cost of living crisis."
https://x.com/RichardBurgon/status/1977817674118795387
The only people seemingly in favour of ID cards are Starmer and Blair, even the ministers sent out to defend the policy don’t know what to say.
The Internet is also a problem; people (and trolls, and bots...) highlight their terrible experiences, and might make them seem typical. Five people complaining about bad service online get heard; the thousands who had acceptable service do not.
The current one or the one we heard from before July 2024 ?
But we're at a major inflexion point in the global economy, outside of a large trade block, running large fiscal and balance of payments deficits, and with debt >100% of GDP.
And suffering persistent low growth.
So we're in greater danger of becoming broken than at any time in the last forty years, I think.
It is all good until someone (yes, you, DEFRA) produces a macro-laden spreadsheet in Excel that you are supposed to fill in. Curse them and all their works.
Instances where we have already done that are left as exercises for the reader.