"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
In my day (end of the '50's) it was London followed by Nottingham.
London meaning the School of Pharmacy? Which merged into UCL, and thus became part of the Russell Group, in 2012. Nottingham is also Russell Group.
However, today, it's places like non-RG Swansea.
I didn't realise Swansea offered Pharmacy. In my day the only place in Wales was Cardiff.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
I suspect what HY is hoping for is a return to only the wealthiest 7% enjoying the benefits of the University system. This is why people like HY are so exercised by people who they don't believe can afford University loans, which essentially is everyone after the 2023 scheme was adopted.
No, just a genuine market, so Oxbridge Law and Medicine and Economics graduates are charged the highest fees and those studying creative arts and humanities at lower ranked universities the lowest fees
What about Oxbridge under-graduates reading Classics? That strikes me as a bollocks degree.
No, it is a proper degree in a traditional subject requiring extensive understanding of grammar and cases
Rubbish. It is even less useful than my politics degree.
To overlook the intrinsic as opposed to the utilitarian value of education is one of the consequences of overlooking the intrinsic value of education. Gradgrind rules.
To recover from this illness try a study of one of the fruits of profound learning and scholarship of the ancient world. Potts on Elamite archaeology, Howard-Johnston on the 6th and 7th century Byzantine/Persians wars, Peter Brown on anything under the sun. Or Mary Beard's vigorous and radical defence of classics published recently.
My older daughter is studying classics at St Andrews and absolutely loves it. And it’s a lot harder that film studies at Sussex Uni
She’s shown me some of her assignments. Reading a lot of difficult books full of dense and challenging ideas. But also some of the greatest ideas in human history
She’s worried the course is non vocational. I’ve told her to forget that and enjoy it (which she does). We have no idea if anyone will have a job in a decade. So study what you love
Indeed, though having a successful millionaire thriller writer as he father makes it a bit easier for her to study a subject she loves than if her father was on minimum wage or a below average income. In which case such students will be more likely to study a vocational degree more likely to get them a high earning job like Law or Business.
Though as you state with AI you also want to learn creative skills and I am sure your daughter will be learning a lot of that and still plenty of jobs in museums etc for Classicists AI can't do
I’m not allowed to discuss THAT technology so I will restrict myself to observing that virtually ALL “intellectual” jobs are threatened, and nothing I have seen lately dissuades me from that, and I have seen quite a lot
In other news it is fucking pissing down in Rwanda. But I spent the morning larking about with wild gorillas, and it was beaut. So let the rain fall, and keep the jungle green
If it goes really bad no job intellectual or not is safe. By which time anyway we will all most be living on a Universal Basic Income funded by a massive robot tax on the big corporations and largest employers only employing robots as no party would get elected to government otherwise ever again without that as its policy
You often repeat this as if it’s certain but just because a government is elected to do something doesn’t mean they can. A “massive robot tax” might not be able to fund a universal basic income and then what?
There won't be a masssive robot tax as there won't be robots to tax. How can I put this - they won't get licensed for a variety of reasons: Security risk of sticking super-strong humanoid machines throughout society waiting to kill all the humans on command Security risk of having all your personal data and your very existence being stolen by the company making the robot who lives in your house Security risk of your robot seeing all you do. And your kids do Security risk of that Temu robot being a front for foreign governments and dodgy billionaires
And I haven't even mentioned the calamitous effect on society and economy of mass unemployment.
Not happening.
You say that, but a few decades ago, nobody would have thought that everyone would now be carrying around tracking devices with sensors to record everything going on around them.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
I suspect what HY is hoping for is a return to only the wealthiest 7% enjoying the benefits of the University system. This is why people like HY are so exercised by people who they don't believe can afford University loans, which essentially is everyone after the 2023 scheme was adopted.
No, just a genuine market, so Oxbridge Law and Medicine and Economics graduates are charged the highest fees and those studying creative arts and humanities at lower ranked universities the lowest fees
What about Oxbridge under-graduates reading Classics? That strikes me as a bollocks degree.
No, it is a proper degree in a traditional subject requiring extensive understanding of grammar and cases
Rubbish. It is even less useful than my politics degree.
To overlook the intrinsic as opposed to the utilitarian value of education is one of the consequences of overlooking the intrinsic value of education. Gradgrind rules.
To recover from this illness try a study of one of the fruits of profound learning and scholarship of the ancient world. Potts on Elamite archaeology, Howard-Johnston on the 6th and 7th century Byzantine/Persians wars, Peter Brown on anything under the sun. Or Mary Beard's vigorous and radical defence of classics published recently.
My older daughter is studying classics at St Andrews and absolutely loves it. And it’s a lot harder that film studies at Sussex Uni
She’s shown me some of her assignments. Reading a lot of difficult books full of dense and challenging ideas. But also some of the greatest ideas in human history
She’s worried the course is non vocational. I’ve told her to forget that and enjoy it (which she does). We have no idea if anyone will have a job in a decade. So study what you love
Indeed, though having a successful millionaire thriller writer as he father makes it a bit easier for her to study a subject she loves than if her father was on minimum wage or a below average income. In which case such students will be more likely to study a vocational degree more likely to get them a high earning job like Law or Business.
Though as you state with AI you also want to learn creative skills and I am sure your daughter will be learning a lot of that and still plenty of jobs in museums etc for Classicists AI can't do
I’m not allowed to discuss THAT technology so I will restrict myself to observing that virtually ALL “intellectual” jobs are threatened, and nothing I have seen lately dissuades me from that, and I have seen quite a lot
In other news it is fucking pissing down in Rwanda. But I spent the morning larking about with wild gorillas, and it was beaut. So let the rain fall, and keep the jungle green
If it goes really bad no job intellectual or not is safe. By which time anyway we will all most be living on a Universal Basic Income funded by a massive robot tax on the big corporations and largest employers only employing robots as no party would get elected to government otherwise ever again without that as its policy
You often repeat this as if it’s certain but just because a government is elected to do something doesn’t mean they can. A “massive robot tax” might not be able to fund a universal basic income and then what?
There won't be a masssive robot tax as there won't be robots to tax. How can I put this - they won't get licensed for a variety of reasons: Security risk of sticking super-strong humanoid machines throughout society waiting to kill all the humans on command Security risk of having all your personal data and your very existence being stolen by the company making the robot who lives in your house Security risk of your robot seeing all you do. And your kids do Security risk of that Temu robot being a front for foreign governments and dodgy billionaires
And I haven't even mentioned the calamitous effect on society and economy of mass unemployment.
Not happening.
All of these concerns were raised with self driving cars, public sector contracts with Big Tech etc. Waymo is now getting licensing around the world.
I have a feeling this is probably a bit like Deepseek only spent $6 million training their LLM. Aren't all the altheles these days on for instance some super special baking soda cocktail that costs like £50 a pop.
I don't think his diet was that important, the new adidas trainers on the other hand...
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
In my day (end of the '50's) it was London followed by Nottingham.
London meaning the School of Pharmacy? Which merged into UCL, and thus became part of the Russell Group, in 2012. Nottingham is also Russell Group.
However, today, it's places like non-RG Swansea.
I didn't realise Swansea offered Pharmacy. In my day the only place in Wales was Cardiff.
According to, say the Guardian, Bath is the highest ranked UK university that offers a Pharmacy degree. Not Russell Group.
If I remember correctly, Bath is only not Russell group because it decided to opt out of the club, not because they weren't invited / consistently ranked highly enough. I am trying to remember the other highly ranked uni that isn't for similar reasons.
Not sure their reasoning, as the Russell group and now Million+ are basically "trade union"-esque pressure groups so seems helpful to be in one.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
I suspect what HY is hoping for is a return to only the wealthiest 7% enjoying the benefits of the University system. This is why people like HY are so exercised by people who they don't believe can afford University loans, which essentially is everyone after the 2023 scheme was adopted.
No, just a genuine market, so Oxbridge Law and Medicine and Economics graduates are charged the highest fees and those studying creative arts and humanities at lower ranked universities the lowest fees
What about Oxbridge under-graduates reading Classics? That strikes me as a bollocks degree.
No, it is a proper degree in a traditional subject requiring extensive understanding of grammar and cases
Rubbish. It is even less useful than my politics degree.
To overlook the intrinsic as opposed to the utilitarian value of education is one of the consequences of overlooking the intrinsic value of education. Gradgrind rules.
To recover from this illness try a study of one of the fruits of profound learning and scholarship of the ancient world. Potts on Elamite archaeology, Howard-Johnston on the 6th and 7th century Byzantine/Persians wars, Peter Brown on anything under the sun. Or Mary Beard's vigorous and radical defence of classics published recently.
My older daughter is studying classics at St Andrews and absolutely loves it. And it’s a lot harder that film studies at Sussex Uni
She’s shown me some of her assignments. Reading a lot of difficult books full of dense and challenging ideas. But also some of the greatest ideas in human history
She’s worried the course is non vocational. I’ve told her to forget that and enjoy it (which she does). We have no idea if anyone will have a job in a decade. So study what you love
Indeed, though having a successful millionaire thriller writer as he father makes it a bit easier for her to study a subject she loves than if her father was on minimum wage or a below average income. In which case such students will be more likely to study a vocational degree more likely to get them a high earning job like Law or Business.
Though as you state with AI you also want to learn creative skills and I am sure your daughter will be learning a lot of that and still plenty of jobs in museums etc for Classicists AI can't do
I’m not allowed to discuss THAT technology so I will restrict myself to observing that virtually ALL “intellectual” jobs are threatened, and nothing I have seen lately dissuades me from that, and I have seen quite a lot
In other news it is fucking pissing down in Rwanda. But I spent the morning larking about with wild gorillas, and it was beaut. So let the rain fall, and keep the jungle green
If it goes really bad no job intellectual or not is safe. By which time anyway we will all most be living on a Universal Basic Income funded by a massive robot tax on the big corporations and largest employers only employing robots as no party would get elected to government otherwise ever again without that as its policy
You often repeat this as if it’s certain but just because a government is elected to do something doesn’t mean they can. A “massive robot tax” might not be able to fund a universal basic income and then what?
There won't be a masssive robot tax as there won't be robots to tax. How can I put this - they won't get licensed for a variety of reasons: Security risk of sticking super-strong humanoid machines throughout society waiting to kill all the humans on command Security risk of having all your personal data and your very existence being stolen by the company making the robot who lives in your house Security risk of your robot seeing all you do. And your kids do Security risk of that Temu robot being a front for foreign governments and dodgy billionaires
And I haven't even mentioned the calamitous effect on society and economy of mass unemployment.
Not happening.
You say that, but a few decades ago, nobody would have thought that everyone would now be carrying around tracking devices with sensors to record everything going on around them.
Well, of course
John Reese: I never understood why people put all their information on those sites. Used to make our job a lot easier at the CIA. Harold Finch: Of course. That's why I created them. John Reese: You're telling me you invented online social networking, Finch? Harold Finch: The Machine needed more information. People's social graph, their associations. The government had been trying to figure it out for years. Turns out most people were happy to volunteer it. Business wound up being quite profitable, too.
I have a feeling this is probably a bit like Deepseek only spent $6 million training their LLM. Aren't all the altheles these days on for instance some super special baking soda cocktail that costs like £50 a pop.
I don't think his diet was that important, the new adidas trainers on the other hand...
Well yes that certainly a big factor. But I bet the myth of I did with a couple of slices of toast is also a bit BS. Perhaps strictly true that is what he had for breakfast, but I imagine he had a very careful carb loading phase over the previous day and his carb / caffeine / baking soda intake was also carefully managed before, during and after.
I watched a couple of videos of Keely Hodgkinson and nothing is that relaxed / winging it when it comes to racing.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
In my day (end of the '50's) it was London followed by Nottingham.
London meaning the School of Pharmacy? Which merged into UCL, and thus became part of the Russell Group, in 2012. Nottingham is also Russell Group.
However, today, it's places like non-RG Swansea.
I didn't realise Swansea offered Pharmacy. In my day the only place in Wales was Cardiff.
According to, say the Guardian, Bath is the highest ranked UK university that offers a Pharmacy degree. Not Russell Group.
If I remember correctly, Bath is only not Russell group because it decided to opt out of the club, not because they weren't invited / consistently ranked highly enough. I am trying to remember the other highly ranked uni that isn't for similar reasons.
Bath were part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Group 1994 group - now they may have been asked in 2012 to join the Russell group but I don't think they were..
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
In my day (end of the '50's) it was London followed by Nottingham.
London meaning the School of Pharmacy? Which merged into UCL, and thus became part of the Russell Group, in 2012. Nottingham is also Russell Group.
However, today, it's places like non-RG Swansea.
I didn't realise Swansea offered Pharmacy. In my day the only place in Wales was Cardiff.
According to, say the Guardian, Bath is the highest ranked UK university that offers a Pharmacy degree. Not Russell Group.
If I remember correctly, Bath is only not Russell group because it decided to opt out of the club, not because they weren't invited / consistently ranked highly enough. I am trying to remember the other highly ranked uni that isn't for similar reasons.
Bath were part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Group 1994 group - now they may have been asked in 2012 to join the Russell group but I don't think they were..
I am pretty sure I read somewhere ages ago they turned down the opportunity. It would be very odd to invite Durham, Exeter, Warwick, York all to join and not Bath, they are basically the same standing in ranking etc, and the later 3 are all part of the "new" university wave of the 60/70s along with Bath.
Its all a bit of a silly argument as it isn't even like Ivy type think in the US where they are a specific instution with a specific history. And even then nobody is going well you got your CS degree from MIT or Stanford, not Ivy league though was it.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
I suspect what HY is hoping for is a return to only the wealthiest 7% enjoying the benefits of the University system. This is why people like HY are so exercised by people who they don't believe can afford University loans, which essentially is everyone after the 2023 scheme was adopted.
No, just a genuine market, so Oxbridge Law and Medicine and Economics graduates are charged the highest fees and those studying creative arts and humanities at lower ranked universities the lowest fees
What about Oxbridge under-graduates reading Classics? That strikes me as a bollocks degree.
No, it is a proper degree in a traditional subject requiring extensive understanding of grammar and cases
Rubbish. It is even less useful than my politics degree.
To overlook the intrinsic as opposed to the utilitarian value of education is one of the consequences of overlooking the intrinsic value of education. Gradgrind rules.
To recover from this illness try a study of one of the fruits of profound learning and scholarship of the ancient world. Potts on Elamite archaeology, Howard-Johnston on the 6th and 7th century Byzantine/Persians wars, Peter Brown on anything under the sun. Or Mary Beard's vigorous and radical defence of classics published recently.
My older daughter is studying classics at St Andrews and absolutely loves it. And it’s a lot harder that film studies at Sussex Uni
She’s shown me some of her assignments. Reading a lot of difficult books full of dense and challenging ideas. But also some of the greatest ideas in human history
She’s worried the course is non vocational. I’ve told her to forget that and enjoy it (which she does). We have no idea if anyone will have a job in a decade. So study what you love
I studied Journalism (why?) which I did for a year before binning it. The video production side doesn't really have an impact on my Youtubing now.
I have 4 jobs: Food Industry Consultant - trading is all about personal relationships Food Importer / Distributer - building relationships with customers and suppliers Family Shop & webstores - a dying industry which is under threat from AI run stores YouTuber now with 4 channels at various stages - AI a threat in general but already huge pushback to AI slop. People want to interact with people
So I feel reasonably secure as I continue to flog my guts out. My kids? Eldest has a 1st in English and is a briliant writer but can't get a job doing anything. Am encouraging them to think about how they can make money being creative Middle is about to spend 4 years at Art school specialising in photography. AI isn't going to screw over the creative arts so he'll be ok Youngest is brighter than the rest of us put together. Interested in depth in both energy sciences (and went off to school this morning in her Shell fleece) and palaeontology. Should be ok if we get her nudged into the science / engineering side
Kids today? Under severe threat from technology taking jobs to line the pockets of a few. The kind of "work will be optional" bollocks from Musk suggests a future where we have mass unrest and hunger, and it really concerns me.
Are you serious? Photography is ALREADY fucked. Totally fucked. I know this very well as some of my best friends are well known pro photographers, at least half of whom have had to give up as the industry has basically died. One of my best female friends used to be a lecturer in photography at a well known London college, but she resigned, partly - in her own words - “because I felt so bad teaching a useless degree to students paying good money, and lying to them that they might get a photography job at the end”
I don’t wish to be cruel or nasty, really. I hope all your lovely kids thrive, and I am sure they will if they are as hard working as you. But.. photography?? No. No no no
The pushback against AI shit is already happening. Art won't get removed by it. Anyway, God alone knows whether there's a job taking pictures at the end. Just go do what you want to do
There’s no job taking pictures NOW, Really. I’m not making this up. The numbers of pro photographers making a career out of it have plunged, and a vanishingly small number make REAL money
Just think about it. How many photographers are household names, the same way Don McCullin, Lord Lichfield, David Bailey were. None? Or indeed Cartier Bresson or Frank Capra
The industry, as we knew it, is dying. A few high art photographers and some portrait photographers will cling on. But when an iPhone can now take as good a photo in an amateur hand as a pro could do 30 years ago, there is no real future in this, as a career
I’ve never heard of any of those people mate
I am afraid that reflects rather badly on YOU, except that I have confused Frank Capra with Robert Capa, which reflects rather badly on me
I blame two large “rose water gins” on my jungle balcony in the Virunga mountains
Robert Capa's D-Day photos are iconic and there is an interesting case to suggest his story about the shots being damaged during processing is covering up that he was shit scared on the beach and only took a few terrible photos*. It just happens that some of those have worked brilliantly to show how it was for the average soldier.
* I don't blame him for this - it took guts to go at all.
I have a feeling this is probably a bit like Deepseek only spent $6 million training their LLM. Aren't all the altheles these days on for instance some super special baking soda cocktail that costs like £50 a pop.
I don't think his diet was that important, the new adidas trainers on the other hand...
Discussing with my wife after her 10K yesterday she said "They should all be made to do it barefoot to make it equal"...
Its an interesting point. There was much discussion about the SA disabled murderersprinter and how much advantage his running blades gave him when competing against able bodied sprinters. In his case it seemed his times were better than they 'ought' to have been if he had legs, so there is clearly something to pick at here.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
In my day (end of the '50's) it was London followed by Nottingham.
London meaning the School of Pharmacy? Which merged into UCL, and thus became part of the Russell Group, in 2012. Nottingham is also Russell Group.
However, today, it's places like non-RG Swansea.
I didn't realise Swansea offered Pharmacy. In my day the only place in Wales was Cardiff.
According to, say the Guardian, Bath is the highest ranked UK university that offers a Pharmacy degree. Not Russell Group.
If I remember correctly, Bath is only not Russell group because it decided to opt out of the club, not because they weren't invited / consistently ranked highly enough. I am trying to remember the other highly ranked uni that isn't for similar reasons.
Bath were part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Group 1994 group - now they may have been asked in 2012 to join the Russell group but I don't think they were..
I am pretty sure I read somewhere ages ago they turned down the opportunity. It would be very odd to invite Durham, Exeter, Warwick, York all to join and not Bath, they are basically the same standing in ranking etc, and the later 3 are all part of the "new" university wave of the 60/70s along with Bath.
Its all a bit of a silly argument as it isn't even like Ivy type think in the US where they are a specific instution with a specific history. And even then nobody is going well you got your CS degree from MIT or Stanford, not Ivy league though was it.
No medical school at Bath is the key and the last time it 'might' have been on the cards our deputy VC nixxed it. Turns out he is a failed medic... I've often wondered just how much his personal story played a role!
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
In my day (end of the '50's) it was London followed by Nottingham.
London meaning the School of Pharmacy? Which merged into UCL, and thus became part of the Russell Group, in 2012. Nottingham is also Russell Group.
However, today, it's places like non-RG Swansea.
I didn't realise Swansea offered Pharmacy. In my day the only place in Wales was Cardiff.
According to, say the Guardian, Bath is the highest ranked UK university that offers a Pharmacy degree. Not Russell Group.
If I remember correctly, Bath is only not Russell group because it decided to opt out of the club, not because they weren't invited / consistently ranked highly enough. I am trying to remember the other highly ranked uni that isn't for similar reasons.
Bath were part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Group 1994 group - now they may have been asked in 2012 to join the Russell group but I don't think they were..
I am pretty sure I read somewhere ages ago they turned down the opportunity. It would be very odd to invite Durham, Exeter, Warwick, York all to join and not Bath, they are basically the same standing in ranking etc, and the later 3 are all part of the "new" university wave of the 60/70s along with Bath.
Its all a bit of a silly argument as it isn't even like Ivy type think in the US where they are a specific instution with a specific history. And even then nobody is going well you got your CS degree from MIT or Stanford, not Ivy league though was it.
No medical school at Bath is the key and the last time it 'might' have been on the cards our deputy VC nixxed it. Turns out he is a failed medic... I've often wondered just how much his personal story played a role!
If I remember correctly Bath is also a little odd among the top tier unis that they don't offer (or don't offer a very wide range of) things like humanities, while also not being exclusively STEM like Imperial or an MIT e.g. they have big offering on the sports front. Not offering medicine seems a big ommission if your focus is more science based.
Birmingham council leader says end to year-long bin strike 'within sight'
This is "a deal that would be good for the workforce, represent good value for money and would not repeat the mistakes of the past and risk creating new structural equal pay liabilities," the council leader's statement continues.
Birmingham council leader says end to year-long bin strike 'within sight'
This is "a deal that would be good for the workforce, represent good value for money and would not repeat the mistakes of the past and risk creating new structural equal pay liabilities," the council leader's statement continues.
Sounds expensive....
Sounds conveniently timed too. As this administration won't be paying it...
I have a feeling this is probably a bit like Deepseek only spent $6 million training their LLM. Aren't all the altheles these days on for instance some super special baking soda cocktail that costs like £50 a pop.
I don't think his diet was that important, the new adidas trainers on the other hand...
Well yes that certainly a big factor. But I bet the myth of I did with a couple of slices of toast is also a bit BS. Perhaps strictly true that is what he had for breakfast, but I imagine he had a very careful carb loading phase over the previous day and his carb / caffeine / baking soda intake was also carefully managed before, during and after.
I watched a couple of videos of Keely Hodgkinson and nothing is that relaxed / winging it when it comes to racing.
The other things to note is that these elite marathoners weight nothing. They are just legs on a pivot. I can imagine that their running efficiency is extremely high and I can believe that the race day breakfast is as descibed (its allegedly what they have at their mad African training camps). There is a cool book about a British chap trying to become good at marathons who spends time at one of the camps (Running with the Kenyans).
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
I suspect what HY is hoping for is a return to only the wealthiest 7% enjoying the benefits of the University system. This is why people like HY are so exercised by people who they don't believe can afford University loans, which essentially is everyone after the 2023 scheme was adopted.
No, just a genuine market, so Oxbridge Law and Medicine and Economics graduates are charged the highest fees and those studying creative arts and humanities at lower ranked universities the lowest fees
What about Oxbridge under-graduates reading Classics? That strikes me as a bollocks degree.
No, it is a proper degree in a traditional subject requiring extensive understanding of grammar and cases
Rubbish. It is even less useful than my politics degree.
To overlook the intrinsic as opposed to the utilitarian value of education is one of the consequences of overlooking the intrinsic value of education. Gradgrind rules.
To recover from this illness try a study of one of the fruits of profound learning and scholarship of the ancient world. Potts on Elamite archaeology, Howard-Johnston on the 6th and 7th century Byzantine/Persians wars, Peter Brown on anything under the sun. Or Mary Beard's vigorous and radical defence of classics published recently.
My older daughter is studying classics at St Andrews and absolutely loves it. And it’s a lot harder that film studies at Sussex Uni
She’s shown me some of her assignments. Reading a lot of difficult books full of dense and challenging ideas. But also some of the greatest ideas in human history
She’s worried the course is non vocational. I’ve told her to forget that and enjoy it (which she does). We have no idea if anyone will have a job in a decade. So study what you love
Indeed, though having a successful millionaire thriller writer as he father makes it a bit easier for her to study a subject she loves than if her father was on minimum wage or a below average income. In which case such students will be more likely to study a vocational degree more likely to get them a high earning job like Law or Business.
Though as you state with AI you also want to learn creative skills and I am sure your daughter will be learning a lot of that and still plenty of jobs in museums etc for Classicists AI can't do
I’m not allowed to discuss THAT technology so I will restrict myself to observing that virtually ALL “intellectual” jobs are threatened, and nothing I have seen lately dissuades me from that, and I have seen quite a lot
In other news it is fucking pissing down in Rwanda. But I spent the morning larking about with wild gorillas, and it was beaut. So let the rain fall, and keep the jungle green
If it goes really bad no job intellectual or not is safe. By which time anyway we will all most be living on a Universal Basic Income funded by a massive robot tax on the big corporations and largest employers only employing robots as no party would get elected to government otherwise ever again without that as its policy
You often repeat this as if it’s certain but just because a government is elected to do something doesn’t mean they can. A “massive robot tax” might not be able to fund a universal basic income and then what?
There won't be a masssive robot tax as there won't be robots to tax. How can I put this - they won't get licensed for a variety of reasons: Security risk of sticking super-strong humanoid machines throughout society waiting to kill all the humans on command Security risk of having all your personal data and your very existence being stolen by the company making the robot who lives in your house Security risk of your robot seeing all you do. And your kids do Security risk of that Temu robot being a front for foreign governments and dodgy billionaires
And I haven't even mentioned the calamitous effect on society and economy of mass unemployment.
Not happening.
You say that, but a few decades ago, nobody would have thought that everyone would now be carrying around tracking devices with sensors to record everything going on around them.
My iPhone isn't capable of killing me and those around me on command. Or surreptitiously taking illegal photographs of my children without my permission. Robototron would be able to do both.
If nothing else, the national security consideration is enough to have them banned before they launch.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
In my day (end of the '50's) it was London followed by Nottingham.
London meaning the School of Pharmacy? Which merged into UCL, and thus became part of the Russell Group, in 2012. Nottingham is also Russell Group.
However, today, it's places like non-RG Swansea.
I didn't realise Swansea offered Pharmacy. In my day the only place in Wales was Cardiff.
According to, say the Guardian, Bath is the highest ranked UK university that offers a Pharmacy degree. Not Russell Group.
If I remember correctly, Bath is only not Russell group because it decided to opt out of the club, not because they weren't invited / consistently ranked highly enough. I am trying to remember the other highly ranked uni that isn't for similar reasons.
Bath were part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Group 1994 group - now they may have been asked in 2012 to join the Russell group but I don't think they were..
I am pretty sure I read somewhere ages ago they turned down the opportunity. It would be very odd to invite Durham, Exeter, Warwick, York all to join and not Bath, they are basically the same standing in ranking etc, and the later 3 are all part of the "new" university wave of the 60/70s along with Bath.
Its all a bit of a silly argument as it isn't even like Ivy type think in the US where they are a specific instution with a specific history. And even then nobody is going well you got your CS degree from MIT or Stanford, not Ivy league though was it.
No medical school at Bath is the key and the last time it 'might' have been on the cards our deputy VC nixxed it. Turns out he is a failed medic... I've often wondered just how much his personal story played a role!
If I remember correctly Bath is also a little odd among the top tier unis that they don't offer (or don't offer a very wide range of) things like humanities, while also not being exclusively STEM like Imperial or an MIT e.g. they have big offering on the sports front. Not offering medicine seems a big ommission if your focus is more science based.
Joys of university "politics". Don't miss it.
We definitely are slightly odd in our offerings. Very STEM with just a bit of social sciences. Also the Business School is very profitable. And hence got a massive shiny new building a couple years back while next door to me the office rood leaked so badly that they have gutted it to remove the 1960's asbestos and covered the roof in stick-backed plastic sheet.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
I suspect what HY is hoping for is a return to only the wealthiest 7% enjoying the benefits of the University system. This is why people like HY are so exercised by people who they don't believe can afford University loans, which essentially is everyone after the 2023 scheme was adopted.
No, just a genuine market, so Oxbridge Law and Medicine and Economics graduates are charged the highest fees and those studying creative arts and humanities at lower ranked universities the lowest fees
What about Oxbridge under-graduates reading Classics? That strikes me as a bollocks degree.
No, it is a proper degree in a traditional subject requiring extensive understanding of grammar and cases
Rubbish. It is even less useful than my politics degree.
To overlook the intrinsic as opposed to the utilitarian value of education is one of the consequences of overlooking the intrinsic value of education. Gradgrind rules.
To recover from this illness try a study of one of the fruits of profound learning and scholarship of the ancient world. Potts on Elamite archaeology, Howard-Johnston on the 6th and 7th century Byzantine/Persians wars, Peter Brown on anything under the sun. Or Mary Beard's vigorous and radical defence of classics published recently.
My older daughter is studying classics at St Andrews and absolutely loves it. And it’s a lot harder that film studies at Sussex Uni
She’s shown me some of her assignments. Reading a lot of difficult books full of dense and challenging ideas. But also some of the greatest ideas in human history
She’s worried the course is non vocational. I’ve told her to forget that and enjoy it (which she does). We have no idea if anyone will have a job in a decade. So study what you love
Indeed, though having a successful millionaire thriller writer as he father makes it a bit easier for her to study a subject she loves than if her father was on minimum wage or a below average income. In which case such students will be more likely to study a vocational degree more likely to get them a high earning job like Law or Business.
Though as you state with AI you also want to learn creative skills and I am sure your daughter will be learning a lot of that and still plenty of jobs in museums etc for Classicists AI can't do
I’m not allowed to discuss THAT technology so I will restrict myself to observing that virtually ALL “intellectual” jobs are threatened, and nothing I have seen lately dissuades me from that, and I have seen quite a lot
In other news it is fucking pissing down in Rwanda. But I spent the morning larking about with wild gorillas, and it was beaut. So let the rain fall, and keep the jungle green
If it goes really bad no job intellectual or not is safe. By which time anyway we will all most be living on a Universal Basic Income funded by a massive robot tax on the big corporations and largest employers only employing robots as no party would get elected to government otherwise ever again without that as its policy
You often repeat this as if it’s certain but just because a government is elected to do something doesn’t mean they can. A “massive robot tax” might not be able to fund a universal basic income and then what?
There won't be a masssive robot tax as there won't be robots to tax. How can I put this - they won't get licensed for a variety of reasons: Security risk of sticking super-strong humanoid machines throughout society waiting to kill all the humans on command Security risk of having all your personal data and your very existence being stolen by the company making the robot who lives in your house Security risk of your robot seeing all you do. And your kids do Security risk of that Temu robot being a front for foreign governments and dodgy billionaires
And I haven't even mentioned the calamitous effect on society and economy of mass unemployment.
Not happening.
You say that, but a few decades ago, nobody would have thought that everyone would now be carrying around tracking devices with sensors to record everything going on around them.
My iPhone isn't capable of killing me and those around me on command. Or surreptitiously taking illegal photographs of my children without my permission. Robototron would be able to do both.
If nothing else, the national security consideration is enough to have them banned before they launch.
The phenomenon of people talking in front of devices, then getting connected adverts has already been noted.
There’s a reason that stickers to go over cameras on devices are popular.
The national security implications of having cars, vans, trains, trams etc internet connected with remote updates to software from other countries…..
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
I suspect what HY is hoping for is a return to only the wealthiest 7% enjoying the benefits of the University system. This is why people like HY are so exercised by people who they don't believe can afford University loans, which essentially is everyone after the 2023 scheme was adopted.
No, just a genuine market, so Oxbridge Law and Medicine and Economics graduates are charged the highest fees and those studying creative arts and humanities at lower ranked universities the lowest fees
What about Oxbridge under-graduates reading Classics? That strikes me as a bollocks degree.
No, it is a proper degree in a traditional subject requiring extensive understanding of grammar and cases
Rubbish. It is even less useful than my politics degree.
To overlook the intrinsic as opposed to the utilitarian value of education is one of the consequences of overlooking the intrinsic value of education. Gradgrind rules.
To recover from this illness try a study of one of the fruits of profound learning and scholarship of the ancient world. Potts on Elamite archaeology, Howard-Johnston on the 6th and 7th century Byzantine/Persians wars, Peter Brown on anything under the sun. Or Mary Beard's vigorous and radical defence of classics published recently.
My older daughter is studying classics at St Andrews and absolutely loves it. And it’s a lot harder that film studies at Sussex Uni
She’s shown me some of her assignments. Reading a lot of difficult books full of dense and challenging ideas. But also some of the greatest ideas in human history
She’s worried the course is non vocational. I’ve told her to forget that and enjoy it (which she does). We have no idea if anyone will have a job in a decade. So study what you love
I studied Journalism (why?) which I did for a year before binning it. The video production side doesn't really have an impact on my Youtubing now.
I have 4 jobs: Food Industry Consultant - trading is all about personal relationships Food Importer / Distributer - building relationships with customers and suppliers Family Shop & webstores - a dying industry which is under threat from AI run stores YouTuber now with 4 channels at various stages - AI a threat in general but already huge pushback to AI slop. People want to interact with people
So I feel reasonably secure as I continue to flog my guts out. My kids? Eldest has a 1st in English and is a briliant writer but can't get a job doing anything. Am encouraging them to think about how they can make money being creative Middle is about to spend 4 years at Art school specialising in photography. AI isn't going to screw over the creative arts so he'll be ok Youngest is brighter than the rest of us put together. Interested in depth in both energy sciences (and went off to school this morning in her Shell fleece) and palaeontology. Should be ok if we get her nudged into the science / engineering side
Kids today? Under severe threat from technology taking jobs to line the pockets of a few. The kind of "work will be optional" bollocks from Musk suggests a future where we have mass unrest and hunger, and it really concerns me.
Are you serious? Photography is ALREADY fucked. Totally fucked. I know this very well as some of my best friends are well known pro photographers, at least half of whom have had to give up as the industry has basically died. One of my best female friends used to be a lecturer in photography at a well known London college, but she resigned, partly - in her own words - “because I felt so bad teaching a useless degree to students paying good money, and lying to them that they might get a photography job at the end”
I don’t wish to be cruel or nasty, really. I hope all your lovely kids thrive, and I am sure they will if they are as hard working as you. But.. photography?? No. No no no
The pushback against AI shit is already happening. Art won't get removed by it. Anyway, God alone knows whether there's a job taking pictures at the end. Just go do what you want to do
There’s no job taking pictures NOW, Really. I’m not making this up. The numbers of pro photographers making a career out of it have plunged, and a vanishingly small number make REAL money
Just think about it. How many photographers are household names, the same way Don McCullin, Lord Lichfield, David Bailey were. None? Or indeed Cartier Bresson or Frank Capra
The industry, as we knew it, is dying. A few high art photographers and some portrait photographers will cling on. But when an iPhone can now take as good a photo in an amateur hand as a pro could do 30 years ago, there is no real future in this, as a career
I’ve never heard of any of those people mate
Which shows how the world has changed. I'm 20 years older than one so know who Don McCullin, Lord Lichfield, David Bailey are and some of their work..
Yes it’s partly an age thing but it’s also there are no modern equivalents of Bailey and McCullin. They were genuinely significant national cultural figures (also working class- photography was a great career ladder for poor kids)
Possibly the last “famous” modern day British photographer was Martin Parr, but he recently snuffed it, and I cannot think of any others ready to replace him
My wife knows Don McCullin well. I've met him a few times.
He has some astonishing stories related to his photo assignments. The bravery of going into war zones might just single out a true life photographer from a bot.
It's journalists with cameras mainly. Dedicated photographers famed for being photographers are a dying breed.
I wonder how that has changed these days. I imagine back in the day journlists going to cover anything took a photographer along with them be it war zone or down the court house. Do you need the dedicated photographer now?
I can speak from direct experience. 25 years work on a pricey assignment like this - gorillas and other things in Rwanda - the knappers gazette (or whatever) would definitely have sent a pro photographer. It was great. It meant as a journalist you had a buddy (often literally, you could ask to work with a photographer friend and vice versa)
That began to diminish in the noughties and basically died around 2015
As phone cameras have got better journalists are now expected to take their own photos because they are often good ENOUGH (sorry @Scott_xP you’re simply wrong, as ever)
Otherwise the journal might employ a local snapper for pennies or just go online and find free photos or pay a pittance for stock
There are still some photographic assignments, even ones where a tog works with a hack (but they are so much rarer). And the money you can make is way down
It’s over. As a career for the many, photography is over
This, from the tech billionaire's mouth, is the essence of the "tax the robots" problem.
David Sacks: “Your property is not safe in blue states … because the political class thinks that they can take a chunk of it and wealthy people are going to react to that, and they're going to move their money elsewhere.” https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/2048160371966677474
Prostitutes’ ‘beware book’ could include client list of police and lawyers
Evidence that has gone missing since Emma Caldwell murder could have been damaging for officers, says retired detective
A “beware book” kept by women working in Glasgow’s red-light district around the time of Emma Caldwell’s murder could be damning for police if its contents were uncovered, a retired detective has said.
The book was used by women involved in prostitution to warn each other about potentially dangerous or suspicious clients, at a time when they felt they had to rely on “their wits and each other, not the authorities” to remain safe.
Kept at the city’s Base 75 drop-in centre, the book contained information such as vehicle registrations, names, nicknames and descriptions of clients.
One woman who wrote in the book claimed that the clients listed in it included “lawyers, police, all sorts”.
The “beware book” was taken as evidence by police during the investigation into Caldwell’s murder in 2005. It has since “gone missing”.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
I suspect what HY is hoping for is a return to only the wealthiest 7% enjoying the benefits of the University system. This is why people like HY are so exercised by people who they don't believe can afford University loans, which essentially is everyone after the 2023 scheme was adopted.
No, just a genuine market, so Oxbridge Law and Medicine and Economics graduates are charged the highest fees and those studying creative arts and humanities at lower ranked universities the lowest fees
What about Oxbridge under-graduates reading Classics? That strikes me as a bollocks degree.
No, it is a proper degree in a traditional subject requiring extensive understanding of grammar and cases
Rubbish. It is even less useful than my politics degree.
To overlook the intrinsic as opposed to the utilitarian value of education is one of the consequences of overlooking the intrinsic value of education. Gradgrind rules.
To recover from this illness try a study of one of the fruits of profound learning and scholarship of the ancient world. Potts on Elamite archaeology, Howard-Johnston on the 6th and 7th century Byzantine/Persians wars, Peter Brown on anything under the sun. Or Mary Beard's vigorous and radical defence of classics published recently.
My older daughter is studying classics at St Andrews and absolutely loves it. And it’s a lot harder that film studies at Sussex Uni
She’s shown me some of her assignments. Reading a lot of difficult books full of dense and challenging ideas. But also some of the greatest ideas in human history
She’s worried the course is non vocational. I’ve told her to forget that and enjoy it (which she does). We have no idea if anyone will have a job in a decade. So study what you love
Indeed, though having a successful millionaire thriller writer as he father makes it a bit easier for her to study a subject she loves than if her father was on minimum wage or a below average income. In which case such students will be more likely to study a vocational degree more likely to get them a high earning job like Law or Business.
Though as you state with AI you also want to learn creative skills and I am sure your daughter will be learning a lot of that and still plenty of jobs in museums etc for Classicists AI can't do
I’m not allowed to discuss THAT technology so I will restrict myself to observing that virtually ALL “intellectual” jobs are threatened, and nothing I have seen lately dissuades me from that, and I have seen quite a lot
In other news it is fucking pissing down in Rwanda. But I spent the morning larking about with wild gorillas, and it was beaut. So let the rain fall, and keep the jungle green
If it goes really bad no job intellectual or not is safe. By which time anyway we will all most be living on a Universal Basic Income funded by a massive robot tax on the big corporations and largest employers only employing robots as no party would get elected to government otherwise ever again without that as its policy
You often repeat this as if it’s certain but just because a government is elected to do something doesn’t mean they can. A “massive robot tax” might not be able to fund a universal basic income and then what?
The legend is that Henry Ford - not exactly a generous philanthropist - decided to pay his workers well so that they would be able to afford to buy the cars that they made.
If we're all out of work because we've been replaced by AI and robots then no-one will have any money to buy the things made by AI and robots. I'm not entirely sure that our new Lords and Masters in the Techbro class have worked out that enlightened self-interest requires a degree of generosity on their part, but fingers crossed eh?
Prostitutes’ ‘beware book’ could include client list of police and lawyers
Evidence that has gone missing since Emma Caldwell murder could have been damaging for officers, says retired detective
A “beware book” kept by women working in Glasgow’s red-light district around the time of Emma Caldwell’s murder could be damning for police if its contents were uncovered, a retired detective has said.
The book was used by women involved in prostitution to warn each other about potentially dangerous or suspicious clients, at a time when they felt they had to rely on “their wits and each other, not the authorities” to remain safe.
Kept at the city’s Base 75 drop-in centre, the book contained information such as vehicle registrations, names, nicknames and descriptions of clients.
One woman who wrote in the book claimed that the clients listed in it included “lawyers, police, all sorts”.
The “beware book” was taken as evidence by police during the investigation into Caldwell’s murder in 2005. It has since “gone missing”.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
We could do that. Universities are a fun example of just how broke we are as a country:
Your government slashed funding for universities That means they all have to charge fees up to the cap That means they have to desperately attract any students they can charge more fees for - hence the huge wave of Chinese students into cities like Sheffield And at the same time, so many universities totter on the edge of bankruptsy
Students pay record fees they can never repay for tuition at universities who despite the fees are broke and have to cut funding for tuition.
However have we managed to both impoverish graduates and universities at the same time?
Prostitutes’ ‘beware book’ could include client list of police and lawyers
Evidence that has gone missing since Emma Caldwell murder could have been damaging for officers, says retired detective
A “beware book” kept by women working in Glasgow’s red-light district around the time of Emma Caldwell’s murder could be damning for police if its contents were uncovered, a retired detective has said.
The book was used by women involved in prostitution to warn each other about potentially dangerous or suspicious clients, at a time when they felt they had to rely on “their wits and each other, not the authorities” to remain safe.
Kept at the city’s Base 75 drop-in centre, the book contained information such as vehicle registrations, names, nicknames and descriptions of clients.
One woman who wrote in the book claimed that the clients listed in it included “lawyers, police, all sorts”.
The “beware book” was taken as evidence by police during the investigation into Caldwell’s murder in 2005. It has since “gone missing”.
I have a feeling this is probably a bit like Deepseek only spent $6 million training their LLM. Aren't all the altheles these days on for instance some super special baking soda cocktail that costs like £50 a pop.
I don't think his diet was that important, the new adidas trainers on the other hand...
Discussing with my wife after her 10K yesterday she said "They should all be made to do it barefoot to make it equal"...
Its an interesting point. There was much discussion about the SA disabled murderersprinter and how much advantage his running blades gave him when competing against able bodied sprinters. In his case it seemed his times were better than they 'ought' to have been if he had legs, so there is clearly something to pick at here.
Likewise swimmers.
Dodgy costumes give them an advantage. They should all have to compete naked.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
I suspect what HY is hoping for is a return to only the wealthiest 7% enjoying the benefits of the University system. This is why people like HY are so exercised by people who they don't believe can afford University loans, which essentially is everyone after the 2023 scheme was adopted.
No, just a genuine market, so Oxbridge Law and Medicine and Economics graduates are charged the highest fees and those studying creative arts and humanities at lower ranked universities the lowest fees
What about Oxbridge under-graduates reading Classics? That strikes me as a bollocks degree.
No, it is a proper degree in a traditional subject requiring extensive understanding of grammar and cases
Rubbish. It is even less useful than my politics degree.
To overlook the intrinsic as opposed to the utilitarian value of education is one of the consequences of overlooking the intrinsic value of education. Gradgrind rules.
To recover from this illness try a study of one of the fruits of profound learning and scholarship of the ancient world. Potts on Elamite archaeology, Howard-Johnston on the 6th and 7th century Byzantine/Persians wars, Peter Brown on anything under the sun. Or Mary Beard's vigorous and radical defence of classics published recently.
My older daughter is studying classics at St Andrews and absolutely loves it. And it’s a lot harder that film studies at Sussex Uni
She’s shown me some of her assignments. Reading a lot of difficult books full of dense and challenging ideas. But also some of the greatest ideas in human history
She’s worried the course is non vocational. I’ve told her to forget that and enjoy it (which she does). We have no idea if anyone will have a job in a decade. So study what you love
Indeed, though having a successful millionaire thriller writer as he father makes it a bit easier for her to study a subject she loves than if her father was on minimum wage or a below average income. In which case such students will be more likely to study a vocational degree more likely to get them a high earning job like Law or Business.
Though as you state with AI you also want to learn creative skills and I am sure your daughter will be learning a lot of that and still plenty of jobs in museums etc for Classicists AI can't do
I’m not allowed to discuss THAT technology so I will restrict myself to observing that virtually ALL “intellectual” jobs are threatened, and nothing I have seen lately dissuades me from that, and I have seen quite a lot
In other news it is fucking pissing down in Rwanda. But I spent the morning larking about with wild gorillas, and it was beaut. So let the rain fall, and keep the jungle green
If it goes really bad no job intellectual or not is safe. By which time anyway we will all most be living on a Universal Basic Income funded by a massive robot tax on the big corporations and largest employers only employing robots as no party would get elected to government otherwise ever again without that as its policy
You often repeat this as if it’s certain but just because a government is elected to do something doesn’t mean they can. A “massive robot tax” might not be able to fund a universal basic income and then what?
There won't be a masssive robot tax as there won't be robots to tax. How can I put this - they won't get licensed for a variety of reasons: Security risk of sticking super-strong humanoid machines throughout society waiting to kill all the humans on command Security risk of having all your personal data and your very existence being stolen by the company making the robot who lives in your house Security risk of your robot seeing all you do. And your kids do Security risk of that Temu robot being a front for foreign governments and dodgy billionaires
And I haven't even mentioned the calamitous effect on society and economy of mass unemployment.
Not happening.
No big technological change has ever produced long-term mass unemployment (although there has been short-term disruption).
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
In my day (end of the '50's) it was London followed by Nottingham.
London meaning the School of Pharmacy? Which merged into UCL, and thus became part of the Russell Group, in 2012. Nottingham is also Russell Group.
However, today, it's places like non-RG Swansea.
I didn't realise Swansea offered Pharmacy. In my day the only place in Wales was Cardiff.
According to, say the Guardian, Bath is the highest ranked UK university that offers a Pharmacy degree. Not Russell Group.
If I remember correctly, Bath is only not Russell group because it decided to opt out of the club, not because they weren't invited / consistently ranked highly enough. I am trying to remember the other highly ranked uni that isn't for similar reasons.
Bath were part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Group 1994 group - now they may have been asked in 2012 to join the Russell group but I don't think they were..
I am pretty sure I read somewhere ages ago they turned down the opportunity. It would be very odd to invite Durham, Exeter, Warwick, York all to join and not Bath, they are basically the same standing in ranking etc, and the later 3 are all part of the "new" university wave of the 60/70s along with Bath.
Its all a bit of a silly argument as it isn't even like Ivy type think in the US where they are a specific instution with a specific history. And even then nobody is going well you got your CS degree from MIT or Stanford, not Ivy league though was it.
No medical school at Bath is the key and the last time it 'might' have been on the cards our deputy VC nixxed it. Turns out he is a failed medic... I've often wondered just how much his personal story played a role!
If I remember correctly Bath is also a little odd among the top tier unis that they don't offer (or don't offer a very wide range of) things like humanities, while also not being exclusively STEM like Imperial or an MIT e.g. they have big offering on the sports front. Not offering medicine seems a big ommission if your focus is more science based.
Joys of university "politics". Don't miss it.
Imperial is no longer exclusively STEM. The Tanaka Business School opened about 20 years ago.
What @HYUFD has blissfully ignored is my point about funding.
Under the system his lot brought in we simultaneously have three problems: Students who owe literally unpayable amounts at punitive rates of interest Universities who are broke despite charging these vast fees Towns and Cities being swamped by a student immigration flood
The solution is not "let the Russel Group charge more fees". We need to start funding education properly. Its the best long term investment we can make.
The Rwanda genocide is maybe the weirdest of all 20th century mass atrocities
I’ve now read quite a lot about it, but no one has a really good answer to the basic question: WHY
Yes the Tutsis were favoured by colonialists but that’s true or many ex colonies around the world. Divide and rule was an imperialist doctrine
Only in Rwanda did 900,000 die in three months of insane psychotic slaughter
Partition of India 1947 says "Namaste/Salaam Aleikum" - perhaps a million dead, 10 million or more refugees.
But there you can see a reason for the appalling violence, and the scale of the violence. But Rwanda? It is much more difficult
Having been to Rwanda a couple of times, the only one of the various films made about that time that they rate locally is Shooting Dogs, with John Hurt. The one that got the plaudits - Hotel Rwanda - attracts scathing comment there, as being neither truthful nor accurate, and not looking a thing like Rwanda having been filmed in South Africa.
What’s happening right now in Sudan is almost as horrific.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
I suspect what HY is hoping for is a return to only the wealthiest 7% enjoying the benefits of the University system. This is why people like HY are so exercised by people who they don't believe can afford University loans, which essentially is everyone after the 2023 scheme was adopted.
No, just a genuine market, so Oxbridge Law and Medicine and Economics graduates are charged the highest fees and those studying creative arts and humanities at lower ranked universities the lowest fees
What about Oxbridge under-graduates reading Classics? That strikes me as a bollocks degree.
No, it is a proper degree in a traditional subject requiring extensive understanding of grammar and cases
Rubbish. It is even less useful than my politics degree.
To overlook the intrinsic as opposed to the utilitarian value of education is one of the consequences of overlooking the intrinsic value of education. Gradgrind rules.
To recover from this illness try a study of one of the fruits of profound learning and scholarship of the ancient world. Potts on Elamite archaeology, Howard-Johnston on the 6th and 7th century Byzantine/Persians wars, Peter Brown on anything under the sun. Or Mary Beard's vigorous and radical defence of classics published recently.
My older daughter is studying classics at St Andrews and absolutely loves it. And it’s a lot harder that film studies at Sussex Uni
She’s shown me some of her assignments. Reading a lot of difficult books full of dense and challenging ideas. But also some of the greatest ideas in human history
She’s worried the course is non vocational. I’ve told her to forget that and enjoy it (which she does). We have no idea if anyone will have a job in a decade. So study what you love
Indeed, though having a successful millionaire thriller writer as he father makes it a bit easier for her to study a subject she loves than if her father was on minimum wage or a below average income. In which case such students will be more likely to study a vocational degree more likely to get them a high earning job like Law or Business.
Though as you state with AI you also want to learn creative skills and I am sure your daughter will be learning a lot of that and still plenty of jobs in museums etc for Classicists AI can't do
I’m not allowed to discuss THAT technology so I will restrict myself to observing that virtually ALL “intellectual” jobs are threatened, and nothing I have seen lately dissuades me from that, and I have seen quite a lot
In other news it is fucking pissing down in Rwanda. But I spent the morning larking about with wild gorillas, and it was beaut. So let the rain fall, and keep the jungle green
If it goes really bad no job intellectual or not is safe. By which time anyway we will all most be living on a Universal Basic Income funded by a massive robot tax on the big corporations and largest employers only employing robots as no party would get elected to government otherwise ever again without that as its policy
You often repeat this as if it’s certain but just because a government is elected to do something doesn’t mean they can. A “massive robot tax” might not be able to fund a universal basic income and then what?
There won't be a masssive robot tax as there won't be robots to tax. How can I put this - they won't get licensed for a variety of reasons: Security risk of sticking super-strong humanoid machines throughout society waiting to kill all the humans on command Security risk of having all your personal data and your very existence being stolen by the company making the robot who lives in your house Security risk of your robot seeing all you do. And your kids do Security risk of that Temu robot being a front for foreign governments and dodgy billionaires
And I haven't even mentioned the calamitous effect on society and economy of mass unemployment.
Not happening.
You say that, but a few decades ago, nobody would have thought that everyone would now be carrying around tracking devices with sensors to record everything going on around them.
My iPhone isn't capable of killing me and those around me on command..
I’m sure Hezbollah felt the same about their pagers.
Birmingham council leader says end to year-long bin strike 'within sight'
This is "a deal that would be good for the workforce, represent good value for money and would not repeat the mistakes of the past and risk creating new structural equal pay liabilities," the council leader's statement continues.
Sounds expensive....
That’s okay. It’s only the hard pressed council tax payer footing the bill.
Falklanders should 'go back' to England, insists Argentina in renewed war of words
Sounds like a policy that Reform and their fellow travelers would agree with.
Of course, all of the non-indigenous Argentinians should go back to Europe too.
Sigh
It’s the state policy of Argentina that they want the Falklands.
Just as the Spanish claim Gibraltar.
Nothing has changed.
And no one in Argentina is going to fall for a replay of 1982
Point of order. Mr Trump started this particular Falklands disagreement as punishment to Starmer for not joining in the war Mr Trump recently won with Iran.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
I suspect what HY is hoping for is a return to only the wealthiest 7% enjoying the benefits of the University system. This is why people like HY are so exercised by people who they don't believe can afford University loans, which essentially is everyone after the 2023 scheme was adopted.
No, just a genuine market, so Oxbridge Law and Medicine and Economics graduates are charged the highest fees and those studying creative arts and humanities at lower ranked universities the lowest fees
What about Oxbridge under-graduates reading Classics? That strikes me as a bollocks degree.
No, it is a proper degree in a traditional subject requiring extensive understanding of grammar and cases
Rubbish. It is even less useful than my politics degree.
To overlook the intrinsic as opposed to the utilitarian value of education is one of the consequences of overlooking the intrinsic value of education. Gradgrind rules.
To recover from this illness try a study of one of the fruits of profound learning and scholarship of the ancient world. Potts on Elamite archaeology, Howard-Johnston on the 6th and 7th century Byzantine/Persians wars, Peter Brown on anything under the sun. Or Mary Beard's vigorous and radical defence of classics published recently.
My older daughter is studying classics at St Andrews and absolutely loves it. And it’s a lot harder that film studies at Sussex Uni
She’s shown me some of her assignments. Reading a lot of difficult books full of dense and challenging ideas. But also some of the greatest ideas in human history
She’s worried the course is non vocational. I’ve told her to forget that and enjoy it (which she does). We have no idea if anyone will have a job in a decade. So study what you love
Indeed, though having a successful millionaire thriller writer as he father makes it a bit easier for her to study a subject she loves than if her father was on minimum wage or a below average income. In which case such students will be more likely to study a vocational degree more likely to get them a high earning job like Law or Business.
Though as you state with AI you also want to learn creative skills and I am sure your daughter will be learning a lot of that and still plenty of jobs in museums etc for Classicists AI can't do
I’m not allowed to discuss THAT technology so I will restrict myself to observing that virtually ALL “intellectual” jobs are threatened, and nothing I have seen lately dissuades me from that, and I have seen quite a lot
In other news it is fucking pissing down in Rwanda. But I spent the morning larking about with wild gorillas, and it was beaut. So let the rain fall, and keep the jungle green
If it goes really bad no job intellectual or not is safe. By which time anyway we will all most be living on a Universal Basic Income funded by a massive robot tax on the big corporations and largest employers only employing robots as no party would get elected to government otherwise ever again without that as its policy
You often repeat this as if it’s certain but just because a government is elected to do something doesn’t mean they can. A “massive robot tax” might not be able to fund a universal basic income and then what?
There won't be a masssive robot tax as there won't be robots to tax. How can I put this - they won't get licensed for a variety of reasons: Security risk of sticking super-strong humanoid machines throughout society waiting to kill all the humans on command Security risk of having all your personal data and your very existence being stolen by the company making the robot who lives in your house Security risk of your robot seeing all you do. And your kids do Security risk of that Temu robot being a front for foreign governments and dodgy billionaires
And I haven't even mentioned the calamitous effect on society and economy of mass unemployment.
Not happening.
You say that, but a few decades ago, nobody would have thought that everyone would now be carrying around tracking devices with sensors to record everything going on around them.
My iPhone isn't capable of killing me and those around me on command.
You should download the app for that. It's really useful.
What @HYUFD has blissfully ignored is my point about funding.
Under the system his lot brought in we simultaneously have three problems: Students who owe literally unpayable amounts at punitive rates of interest Universities who are broke despite charging these vast fees Towns and Cities being swamped by a student immigration flood
The solution is not "let the Russel Group charge more fees". We need to start funding education properly. Its the best long term investment we can make.
where does the money come from
Chinese middle class families? That's who is paying for a lot of the sector presently.
"And by the way, if that piece is right, Global Consult, the consultancy firm which Mandelson co-founded, was "reportedly absent from his vetting." How on earth is that possible? If you are looking to mitigate risk and conflicts of interest how could you possibly exclude a 24% share in a consultancy firm with international clients looking for UK contracts? What more blatant risk could you have?
We can already infer that the correspondence with Epstein was not disclosed or found because surely he would never have been appointed if it was.
So, this is 2 major risks that have apparently not been identified in the DV. Where the recommendation was that he not be appointed. We have got quite wrapped up with what Starmer was and was not told but was it worth the paper it was written on?"
The context of this was a presentation made to Starmer and Mandelson by a client of Mandelson's firm that was not reported by Starmer for reasons that are somewhat unclear, a client who ended up with a defence contract worth £750m.
To me, this looks like a breach of the Ministerial code by Starmer with very serious consequences which, at the very least, shows appalling judgment by him. If this gains traction things may well move a lot faster than some of his potential successors might want.
Exactly. It is utterly flagrant, and I think, unsurvivable. Can we imagine the outrage if Boris had done the same thing?
"And by the way, if that piece is right, Global Consult, the consultancy firm which Mandelson co-founded, was "reportedly absent from his vetting." How on earth is that possible? If you are looking to mitigate risk and conflicts of interest how could you possibly exclude a 24% share in a consultancy firm with international clients looking for UK contracts? What more blatant risk could you have?
We can already infer that the correspondence with Epstein was not disclosed or found because surely he would never have been appointed if it was.
So, this is 2 major risks that have apparently not been identified in the DV. Where the recommendation was that he not be appointed. We have got quite wrapped up with what Starmer was and was not told but was it worth the paper it was written on?"
The context of this was a presentation made to Starmer and Mandelson by a client of Mandelson's firm that was not reported by Starmer for reasons that are somewhat unclear, a client who ended up with a defence contract worth £750m.
To me, this looks like a breach of the Ministerial code by Starmer with very serious consequences which, at the very least, shows appalling judgment by him. If this gains traction things may well move a lot faster than some of his potential successors might want.
Exactly. It is utterly flagrant, and I think, unsurvivable. Can we imagine the outrage if Boris had done the same thing?
Labour are gonna get marmalised on May 7 and I am pretty sure things will move fast from that point
I believe you are in Camden - might be one of the many interesting results in London.
Indeed. Might it turn Green??
Worth noting that Starmer’s personal vote in Camden Holborn and St Pancras in GE24 was seriously disappointing - down 17.4%. He only won because the extant majority was so huge it could take a beating
There’s a real chance he could personally lose the seat in 28-29
He’ll probably stand down ahead of, or at, the next election.
This, from the tech billionaire's mouth, is the essence of the "tax the robots" problem.
David Sacks: “Your property is not safe in blue states … because the political class thinks that they can take a chunk of it and wealthy people are going to react to that, and they're going to move their money elsewhere.” https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/2048160371966677474
A robot tax would obviously be global because if AI leads to 50%+ of the working age population in every nation unable to get full paid permanent employment no government in any nation would get re elected without backing a UBI funded by a robot tax.
Even Beijing's one party state Communist government would not be safe if most of its population are poor and out of work, it can get away without democracy and contested national elections while its people are getting richer, not if they are getting poorer. That is a recipe for revolution otherwise
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
In my day (end of the '50's) it was London followed by Nottingham.
London meaning the School of Pharmacy? Which merged into UCL, and thus became part of the Russell Group, in 2012. Nottingham is also Russell Group.
However, today, it's places like non-RG Swansea.
I didn't realise Swansea offered Pharmacy. In my day the only place in Wales was Cardiff.
According to, say the Guardian, Bath is the highest ranked UK university that offers a Pharmacy degree. Not Russell Group.
If I remember correctly, Bath is only not Russell group because it decided to opt out of the club, not because they weren't invited / consistently ranked highly enough. I am trying to remember the other highly ranked uni that isn't for similar reasons.
Bath were part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Group 1994 group - now they may have been asked in 2012 to join the Russell group but I don't think they were..
I am pretty sure I read somewhere ages ago they turned down the opportunity. It would be very odd to invite Durham, Exeter, Warwick, York all to join and not Bath, they are basically the same standing in ranking etc, and the later 3 are all part of the "new" university wave of the 60/70s along with Bath.
Its all a bit of a silly argument as it isn't even like Ivy type think in the US where they are a specific instution with a specific history. And even then nobody is going well you got your CS degree from MIT or Stanford, not Ivy league though was it.
No medical school at Bath is the key and the last time it 'might' have been on the cards our deputy VC nixxed it. Turns out he is a failed medic... I've often wondered just how much his personal story played a role!
If I remember correctly Bath is also a little odd among the top tier unis that they don't offer (or don't offer a very wide range of) things like humanities, while also not being exclusively STEM like Imperial or an MIT e.g. they have big offering on the sports front. Not offering medicine seems a big ommission if your focus is more science based.
Joys of university "politics". Don't miss it.
Bath, of course started life as Bristol Tech. And there's a medical school at Bristol Uni.
What @HYUFD has blissfully ignored is my point about funding.
Under the system his lot brought in we simultaneously have three problems: Students who owe literally unpayable amounts at punitive rates of interest Universities who are broke despite charging these vast fees Towns and Cities being swamped by a student immigration flood
The solution is not "let the Russel Group charge more fees". We need to start funding education properly. Its the best long term investment we can make.
where does the money come from
where does the money come from to pay for our economy withering and dying due to the lack of education?
Falklanders should 'go back' to England, insists Argentina in renewed war of words
Sounds like a policy that Reform and their fellow travelers would agree with.
Of course, all of the non-indigenous Argentinians should go back to Europe too.
Sigh
It’s the state policy of Argentina that they want the Falklands.
Just as the Spanish claim Gibraltar.
Nothing has changed.
And no one in Argentina is going to fall for a replay of 1982
Point of order. Mr Trump started this particular Falklands disagreement as punishment to Starmer for not joining in the war Mr Trump recently won with Iran.
What war vs Iran the Yanks won? Thought it was a stalemate.
Falklanders should 'go back' to England, insists Argentina in renewed war of words
Sounds like a policy that Reform and their fellow travelers would agree with.
Of course, all of the non-indigenous Argentinians should go back to Europe too.
Sigh
It’s the state policy of Argentina that they want the Falklands.
Just as the Spanish claim Gibraltar.
Nothing has changed.
And no one in Argentina is going to fall for a replay of 1982
Point of order. Mr Trump started this particular Falklands disagreement as punishment to Starmer for not joining in the war Mr Trump recently won with Iran.
What war vs Iran the Yanks won? Thought it was a stalemate.
Falklanders should 'go back' to England, insists Argentina in renewed war of words
Sounds like a policy that Reform and their fellow travelers would agree with.
Of course, all of the non-indigenous Argentinians should go back to Europe too.
Sigh
It’s the state policy of Argentina that they want the Falklands.
Just as the Spanish claim Gibraltar.
Nothing has changed.
And no one in Argentina is going to fall for a replay of 1982
Point of order. Mr Trump started this particular Falklands disagreement as punishment to Starmer for not joining in the war Mr Trump recently won with Iran.
What war vs Iran the Yanks won? Thought it was a stalemate.
"Foxy: Pretty appalling UK figures on healthy life expectancy, declining by 2 years in the last decade. It has improved slowly in comparable countries:
We are not going to be reducing the welfare bill if we do not tackle this issue."
It is hardly surprising though, when we have immigration at scale from countries with much lower life expectancies. Have a wave of immigrants from say Afghanistan - where life expectancy is 12 years less than world averages - and it is an inevitable consequence.
Even worse, life expectancy in Nigeria is around 54, one of the lowest in the world.
The extra health care burden is an obvious consequence of large scale population migration into the UK. Better universal healthcare, free at the point of use, is one of the drivers of the desire to make a new life here. The likelihood is the migrants are likely to have greater health issues manifesting earlier than the native born population. Outwith any arguments about the rights and wrongs of migration, we simply have not made provision for this on a national scale.
Some of us are working ourselves to exhaustion. And for what?
As a nation, we don’t “make provision” for anything. Everything is put on the credit card
More importantly, we have been for decades. And more subtly, we treated short-term windfalls as long-term entitlements.
And all those bills have finally turned inescapably red.
For me the crazy spot was after the birth of our first child. My wife had a decent job, and after maternity leave she went back. We realised that by the time she'd paid for tax and childcare, she was working for free. So she quit.
We have a society where families need 2 jobs to pay the bills. Housing costs are unaffordable without 2 incomes and even then can be impossible for many. As a starter for 10, that's a bad place to be.
Sometimes its worth having someone 'working for free' if they aspire to continuing the career. My wife went back to work doing 3 days rather than 5, and yes we pay childcare (though its heavily subsidised now) but it means she doesn't have a 5 year gap in the career.
Granddaughter-in-law is in a similar position. We shouldn't forget, either, the effect of the student loans 'tax'. Yes, one doesn't 'have' to 'have' to pay back the loan but it's still hanging over people, and there's (or used to be anyway) a culture of paying off loans.
Yes it is a tax. Total generational inequality. Young people in their 20s and 30s face paying an extra 9% marginal rate of income tax for most of their working lives, unlike the likes of 55 year old George Osborne and others responsible for the policy, who not only pay 0% extra in income tax but who like me were probably paid to go to university (in the form of a non means tested maintenance grant.)
It is something that really annoys my children. Getting rid of this burden on them is something I would support. That and a real push on housing.
We should also have a genuine market in course fees based on graduate earning premium, so Economics at Cambridge is far more expensive than say Creative Arts at Brighton. That way student loans repayments are highest for the highest graduate earners and cheaper for the lowest graduate earners
Taht was the original idea. But the universities ended up charging the maximum they were allowed, uniformly. At this point some actual experts in higher education can tell you why.
It doesn't require an expert - the quality of your university course is revealed in the price, so as no University is going to offer a second rate course and no student is going to willing take a second rate course the price is always going to be the maximum allowed.
The maximum allowed should only be able to be charged by Russell Group universities for Law, Economics, Medicine and MBAs and IT, There should then be a sliding scale so that lower ranked university humanities courses actually are told to cut the fees for their courses
Can you evidence that the Russell Group is better than other universities? E.g. for Pharmacy - what is the highest ranked Uni where you can study pharmacy?
Your obsession with the Russell Group is mad.
I suspect what HY is hoping for is a return to only the wealthiest 7% enjoying the benefits of the University system. This is why people like HY are so exercised by people who they don't believe can afford University loans, which essentially is everyone after the 2023 scheme was adopted.
No, just a genuine market, so Oxbridge Law and Medicine and Economics graduates are charged the highest fees and those studying creative arts and humanities at lower ranked universities the lowest fees
What about Oxbridge under-graduates reading Classics? That strikes me as a bollocks degree.
No, it is a proper degree in a traditional subject requiring extensive understanding of grammar and cases
Rubbish. It is even less useful than my politics degree.
To overlook the intrinsic as opposed to the utilitarian value of education is one of the consequences of overlooking the intrinsic value of education. Gradgrind rules.
To recover from this illness try a study of one of the fruits of profound learning and scholarship of the ancient world. Potts on Elamite archaeology, Howard-Johnston on the 6th and 7th century Byzantine/Persians wars, Peter Brown on anything under the sun. Or Mary Beard's vigorous and radical defence of classics published recently.
My older daughter is studying classics at St Andrews and absolutely loves it. And it’s a lot harder that film studies at Sussex Uni
She’s shown me some of her assignments. Reading a lot of difficult books full of dense and challenging ideas. But also some of the greatest ideas in human history
She’s worried the course is non vocational. I’ve told her to forget that and enjoy it (which she does). We have no idea if anyone will have a job in a decade. So study what you love
I studied Journalism (why?) which I did for a year before binning it. The video production side doesn't really have an impact on my Youtubing now.
I have 4 jobs: Food Industry Consultant - trading is all about personal relationships Food Importer / Distributer - building relationships with customers and suppliers Family Shop & webstores - a dying industry which is under threat from AI run stores YouTuber now with 4 channels at various stages - AI a threat in general but already huge pushback to AI slop. People want to interact with people
So I feel reasonably secure as I continue to flog my guts out. My kids? Eldest has a 1st in English and is a briliant writer but can't get a job doing anything. Am encouraging them to think about how they can make money being creative Middle is about to spend 4 years at Art school specialising in photography. AI isn't going to screw over the creative arts so he'll be ok Youngest is brighter than the rest of us put together. Interested in depth in both energy sciences (and went off to school this morning in her Shell fleece) and palaeontology. Should be ok if we get her nudged into the science / engineering side
Kids today? Under severe threat from technology taking jobs to line the pockets of a few. The kind of "work will be optional" bollocks from Musk suggests a future where we have mass unrest and hunger, and it really concerns me.
Are you serious? Photography is ALREADY fucked. Totally fucked. I know this very well as some of my best friends are well known pro photographers, at least half of whom have had to give up as the industry has basically died. One of my best female friends used to be a lecturer in photography at a well known London college, but she resigned, partly - in her own words - “because I felt so bad teaching a useless degree to students paying good money, and lying to them that they might get a photography job at the end”
I don’t wish to be cruel or nasty, really. I hope all your lovely kids thrive, and I am sure they will if they are as hard working as you. But.. photography?? No. No no no
The pushback against AI shit is already happening. Art won't get removed by it. Anyway, God alone knows whether there's a job taking pictures at the end. Just go do what you want to do
There’s no job taking pictures NOW, Really. I’m not making this up. The numbers of pro photographers making a career out of it have plunged, and a vanishingly small number make REAL money
Just think about it. How many photographers are household names, the same way Don McCullin, Lord Lichfield, David Bailey were. None? Or indeed Cartier Bresson or Frank Capra
The industry, as we knew it, is dying. A few high art photographers and some portrait photographers will cling on. But when an iPhone can now take as good a photo in an amateur hand as a pro could do 30 years ago, there is no real future in this, as a career
I’ve never heard of any of those people mate
Which shows how the world has changed. I'm 20 years older than one so know who Don McCullin, Lord Lichfield, David Bailey are and some of their work..
Yes it’s partly an age thing but it’s also there are no modern equivalents of Bailey and McCullin. They were genuinely significant national cultural figures (also working class- photography was a great career ladder for poor kids)
Possibly the last “famous” modern day British photographer was Martin Parr, but he recently snuffed it, and I cannot think of any others ready to replace him
My wife knows Don McCullin well. I've met him a few times.
He has some astonishing stories related to his photo assignments. The bravery of going into war zones might just single out a true life photographer from a bot.
It's journalists with cameras mainly. Dedicated photographers famed for being photographers are a dying breed.
I wonder how that has changed these days. I imagine back in the day journlists going to cover anything took a photographer along with them be it war zone or down the court house. Do you need the dedicated photographer now?
I can speak from direct experience. 25 years work on a pricey assignment like this - gorillas and other things in Rwanda - the knappers gazette (or whatever) would definitely have sent a pro photographer. It was great. It meant as a journalist you had a buddy (often literally, you could ask to work with a photographer friend and vice versa)
That began to diminish in the noughties and basically died around 2015
As phone cameras have got better journalists are now expected to take their own photos because they are often good ENOUGH (sorry @Scott_xP you’re simply wrong, as ever)
Otherwise the journal might employ a local snapper for pennies or just go online and find free photos or pay a pittance for stock
There are still some photographic assignments, even ones where a tog works with a hack (but they are so much rarer). And the money you can make is way down
It’s over. As a career for the many, photography is over
Comments
Guess what?
Not sure their reasoning, as the Russell group and now Million+ are basically "trade union"-esque pressure groups so seems helpful to be in one.
John Reese: I never understood why people put all their information on those sites. Used to make our job a lot easier at the CIA.
Harold Finch: Of course. That's why I created them.
John Reese: You're telling me you invented online social networking, Finch?
Harold Finch: The Machine needed more information. People's social graph, their associations. The government had been trying to figure it out for years. Turns out most people were happy to volunteer it. Business wound up being quite profitable, too.
I watched a couple of videos of Keely Hodgkinson and nothing is that relaxed / winging it when it comes to racing.
Its all a bit of a silly argument as it isn't even like Ivy type think in the US where they are a specific instution with a specific history. And even then nobody is going well you got your CS degree from MIT or Stanford, not Ivy league though was it.
* I don't blame him for this - it took guts to go at all.
See https://medium.com/exposure-magazine/alternate-history-robert-capa-on-d-day-2657f9af914
9-9 now.
Its an interesting point. There was much discussion about the SA disabled
murderersprinter and how much advantage his running blades gave him when competing against able bodied sprinters. In his case it seemed his times were better than they 'ought' to have been if he had legs, so there is clearly something to pick at here.Joys of university "politics". Don't miss it.
This is "a deal that would be good for the workforce, represent good value for money and would not repeat the mistakes of the past and risk creating new structural equal pay liabilities," the council leader's statement continues.
Sounds expensive....
https://news.sky.com/liveblog-webview/politics-latest-keir-starmer-peter-mandelson-vetting-commons-iran-war-olly-robbins-12593360
If nothing else, the national security consideration is enough to have them banned before they launch.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/apr/27/police-assess-claim-robert-jenrick-accepted-donation-from-foreign-donor
He'll fit in even better at Reform then.
There’s a reason that stickers to go over cameras on devices are popular.
The national security implications of having cars, vans, trains, trams etc internet connected with remote updates to software from other countries…..
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/falkland-islands-england-argentina-trump-nato-5HjdYKY_2/
Falklanders should 'go back' to England, insists Argentina in renewed war of words
That began to diminish in the noughties and basically died around 2015
As phone cameras have got better journalists are now expected to take their own photos because they are often good ENOUGH (sorry @Scott_xP you’re simply wrong, as ever)
Otherwise the journal might employ a local snapper for pennies or just go online and find free photos or pay a pittance for stock
There are still some photographic assignments, even ones where a tog works with a hack (but they are so much rarer). And the money you can make is way down
It’s over. As a career for the many, photography is over
David Sacks: “Your property is not safe in blue states … because the political class thinks that they can take a chunk of it and wealthy people are going to react to that, and they're going to move their money elsewhere.”
https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/2048160371966677474
Of course, all of the non-indigenous Argentinians should go back to Europe too.
If we're all out of work because we've been replaced by AI and robots then no-one will have any money to buy the things made by AI and robots. I'm not entirely sure that our new Lords and Masters in the Techbro class have worked out that enlightened self-interest requires a degree of generosity on their part, but fingers crossed eh?
It’s the state policy of Argentina that they want the Falklands.
Just as the Spanish claim Gibraltar.
Nothing has changed.
And no one in Argentina is going to fall for a replay of 1982
Dodgy costumes give them an advantage. They should all have to compete naked.
What’s happening right now in Sudan is almost as horrific.
NEW THREAD
Even Beijing's one party state Communist government would not be safe if most of its population are poor and out of work, it can get away without democracy and contested national elections while its people are getting richer, not if they are getting poorer. That is a recipe for revolution otherwise