Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
When I was at school at least starting doing 4-5 A-Levels was really common. People who were struggling then might drop one after the first year. Also, there has always been UCAS grade / point system at was supposed to just require your best 3, but there was definitely a lot more positivity from university admissions when you were doing 4 or 5. Any more and I think they just thought you were weird and unncessary.
I encouraged my lad to do 4 A-levels, but he flatly refused, saying that the universities would only consider 3 and there was therefore no point in doing more. Instead, he used his spare time to learn everything he could about blockchain, cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance. When he had his interview to study E&M at Oxford, he was then able to talk knowledgeably and passionately about those fields and was subsequently offered a place.
So I guess I was proved wrong. It is perhaps better to study 3 A-levels and use the rest of your time to do something you are passionate about then to study additional A-levels.
Remember that big row we had, a few days ago? When I had an epiphany on the train from Berwick to King’s X, and I realised the big problem with HS2 was the obsession with speed? As I said then, we don’t need the speed, Britain is tiny. We just need the extra capacity
“THE obsession with HS2’s speed is to blame for its failure, an official review has found.
“The project’s focus on achieving the “highest possible speeds” has led to spiralling costs that have crippled progress, according to Sir Stephen Lovegrove. The former national security adviser said the high-speed rail line had gone “disastrously wrong” because of the decision to “gold plate” the project and political pressure to “keep things moving”.”
I don’t need or expect grovelling apologies. I will, however, accept large financial gifts. DM me for my bank deets
I thought the mocking was because you were several years behind schedule relative to the PB train experts who'd been saying that HS2 was about getting the fast passenger trains off the existing lines.
ECML was still not as quick as it was pre-privatisation 90-91 last time I used it, back then there was talk of London-Edinburgh in 2 hours.
Um the fastest ever London to Edinburgh train was 3 hours 29 minutes achieved by 91012 and a shortened mark 4 rake on a non-stop press run in September 1991.
It was 5h30 after the Peterborough improvements in 1971-72.
It then drifted towards 5h40 (but remainded 5h3x) going up to 1977.
In 1977 with the line improvements for HSTs being implemented, the Flying Scotsman was reduced to ~5h27/5h28 with Deltics in their last year on the service.
The HSTs came in and reduced it to (IIRC) 4h47/4h50 in May 1978, then further 4h37/4h40 in May 1979.
4h35 in 1982, following linespeed improvements in Scotland
4h30 in 1985, following the Selby diversion
It drifted up a few mins after this before falling to an all-time best of 4h23 by 1988/9.
Under Diesel it was 6 hours 35 - the A4's weren't that fast.
To add - the problem is all the easy improvements have been done. on the ECML from York onwards the remaining sensible improvements is diverting to the outskirts of Northallerton (it currently goes through the town) and straightening the route between Darlington and Newcastle for it's currently rather slow and windy.
But that will cost billions so is way down the list of priorities - reality is it's going to be roughly 4 hours for ever more..
And four hours is FINE. How much do you think it would benefit the economy if we spent sixty trillion quid and built HS9 and got that down to three hours? Two hours 45 minutes? In the age of zoom and FaceTime it matters not a jot, you can do almost everything remotely. Instead of spending eighty billion pounds on new train lines spend £80m making sure all trains have excellent reliable WiFi
Moreover, we are entering the era of fast safe driverless cars and buses and, soon, driverless helidrones. The future for fixed track expensive trains is not entirely clear
I'd make the case that for the places that get them, fast trains to London are a *bad* thing. I live in a formerly pleasant bit of the Peak District. 15 mins from my house is a railway station from which one can catch a train that's sat on the blocks in Euston about 1h 45min later. This is of varnishingly little utility to me, as I regard London on a dump to be avoided at all costs.
What it means in practice is that the locals are now priced out of all the nice houses by people who should be living in Essex, who still work in London two days a week, and do the rest WFH, and the developers are throwing up Barratt boxes for us unfortunate locals to be moved into because we can't afford the nice houses any more. We shouldn't need more housing in our town, the population was actually drifting down slightly, but now it's just being repopulated by flight from the SE, and it's steadily turning the place into an overpopulated shithole like SE is already.
I'm a fortunate, I've little more money than most, and bought my current house before this was really a thing, so it's gone up in value considerably. Right now I'm in the middle of buying a reasonable house (I.E. not made of cardboard and with a decent garden). I'm moving about as far away from the fast rail connections as is viable whilst staying in the area, and I'm still probably spending £150k more than I would have if it wasn't for the London influx. The money I'm spending now, ten years ago would have bought me a 6 bedroom farmhouse in a couple of acres, now it's buying me 4 bed semi with a reasonable garden.
IMHO we should build a wall above Birmingham and make the southerners pay for it.
My plan is move Parliament to Bradford and watch how quickly HS2 and Northern Power Rail got built.
Equally HS2 would be centered around Birmingham - with all other routes starting / ending there
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
THanks - which version is she using?
Debian stable. If your hardware is supported & you want something that just works then it’s perfectly fine. But it runs on a two-three year update cycle, so I would probably personally choose Ubuntu for whatever I bought new for the hardware support.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
(Apple is also being a bit weird with their UI changes - OSX is no longer the paragon of UI virtue that it used to be. I think the vast profits they make from the iPhone & iPad ecosystem have led to them abandoning OSX to the wiles of their graphic designers.)
Which is why a fairly small push from government or other could beak through.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
THanks - which version is she using?
Debian stable. If your hardware is supported & you want something that just works then it’s perfectly fine. But it runs on a two-three year update cycle, so I would probably personally choose Ubuntu for whatever I bought new for the hardware support.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
(Apple is also being a bit weird with their UI changes - OSX is no longer the paragon of UI virtue that it used to be. I think the vast profits they make from the iPhone & iPad ecosystem have led to them abandoning OSX to the wiles of their graphic designers.)
Which is why a fairly small push from government or other could beak through.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander is expected to confirm that HS2 trains will run slower than initially planned, in a bid to cut costs
So we save what 0.5% of the project cost which will then be spent elsewhere - the whole point of the speed was that it provided a sensible turn round time against a timetable so we needed fewer platforms at both ends
Edit the speed partly came from if we do it in x minutes we can get away with 4 platforms rather than 8.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
When I was at school at least starting doing 4-5 A-Levels was really common. People who were struggling then might drop one after the first year. Also, there has always been UCAS grade / point system at was supposed to just require your best 3, but there was definitely a lot more positivity from university admissions when you were doing 4 or 5. Any more and I think they just thought you were weird and unncessary.
I encouraged my lad to do 4 A-levels, but he flatly refused, saying that the universities would only consider 3 and there was therefore no point in doing more. Instead, he used his spare time to learn everything he could about blockchain, cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance. When he had his interview to study E&M at Oxford, he was then able to talk knowledgeably and passionately about that subject and was subsequently offered a place.
So I guess I was proved wrong. It is perhaps better to study 3 A-levels and use the rest of your time to do something you are passionate about then to study additional A-levels.
Personally I did 6 and still had loads of spare time e.g. my whole weekend was spent playing and attending sports basically from sun up to sun down. Most of my classmates did 4 and seeming not short of sparetime for all sorts of extra-circula activities.
But it does seem to become the case that universities really don't care beyond the 3, unless I think Further Maths if you want to do a Maths degree.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
When I was at school at least starting doing 4-5 A-Levels was really common. People who were struggling then might drop one after the first year. Also, there has always been UCAS grade / point system at was supposed to just require your best 3, but there was definitely a lot more positivity from university admissions when you were doing 4 or 5. Any more and I think they just thought you were weird and unncessary.
Recent trend seems to be schools pushing best possible grades in 3, presumably league table driven
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
THanks - which version is she using?
Debian stable. If your hardware is supported & you want something that just works then it’s perfectly fine. But it runs on a two-three year update cycle, so I would probably personally choose Ubuntu for whatever I bought new for the hardware support.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
(Apple is also being a bit weird with their UI changes - OSX is no longer the paragon of UI virtue that it used to be. I think the vast profits they make from the iPhone & iPad ecosystem have led to them abandoning OSX to the wiles of their graphic designers.)
Forgot Debian. Good suggestion. Back when I had time to try out different distros on a whim, the conservative approach to releases often meant hardware support issues, but I suspect it's much less of an issue now.
But when polled, nobody seems to knows who Rupet Lowe is. YouGov is online surveying, Restore seems to be online right wing mano-sphere influencer hobby horse. I wonder if this number is picking up terminal online types and overemphasising their support.
The Express likes Rupert Lowe, he is clipped up a lot on social media, and then there is GB News. Lowe also claims Restore has more than 100,000 members.
But yes, YouGov's panel does depend on online members.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
It's worse than people think, private sector workers are now seeing real terms wage contraction. The headline number being reported is only positive because Labour have been giving record pay rises to the state sector which is a transfer of wealth from productive parts of the economy to destructive public sectors.
Worse still over the year 190k fewer Brits are in employment and 770k foreigners have replaced them.
This is the ultimate source of Reform's strength and until this changes expect there to be a substantial number of people willing to give Reform and similar parties a fair hearing.
I think the next government will end up taking pretty drastic action and halt all but the most skilled immigration and end the student visa factories coupled with pretty drastic benefit cuts and eligibility changes for disability benefits. I don't see Reform or a Reform/Tory coalition allowing ADHD or depression for disability benefits.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
When I was at school at least starting doing 4-5 A-Levels was really common. People who were struggling then might drop one after the first year. Also, there has always been UCAS grade / point system at was supposed to just require your best 3, but there was definitely a lot more positivity from university admissions when you were doing 4 or 5. Any more and I think they just thought you were weird and unncessary.
Funding, mostly. The government pays for about 16 hours per week teaching for 16-19 year olds. That's enough for three A Levels, but needs cross-subsidy from somewhere to cover four.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
When I was at school at least starting doing 4-5 A-Levels was really common. People who were struggling then might drop one after the first year. Also, there has always been UCAS grade / point system at was supposed to just require your best 3, but there was definitely a lot more positivity from university admissions when you were doing 4 or 5. Any more and I think they just thought you were weird and unncessary.
Recent trend seems to be schools pushing best possible grades in 3, presumably league table driven
It’s money - more a levels mean you need to run more sets of courses which means more teachers are required
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
Yes. Rather unexpectedly, I've had no issues at all using Teams and Zoom on Ubuntu in recent years.
And you can try out Ubuntu from a USB stick before you touch the metal of your machine.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
It's worse than people think, private sector workers are now seeing real terms wage contraction. The headline number being reported is only positive because Labour have been giving record pay rises to the state sector which is a transfer of wealth from productive parts of the economy to destructive public sectors.
Worse still over the year 190k fewer Brits are in employment and 770k foreigners have replaced them.
This is the ultimate source of Reform's strength and until this changes expect there to be a substantial number of people willing to give Reform and similar parties a fair hearing.
I think the next government will end up taking pretty drastic action and halt all but the most skilled immigration and end the student visa factories coupled with pretty drastic benefit cuts and eligibility changes for disability benefits. I don't see Reform or a Reform/Tory coalition allowing ADHD or depression for disability benefits.
No one in Britain should get social housing - certainly in places like central London - unless they were born in Britain. Anyone who has it, who isn’t British born, should be given a three year eviction notice
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
When I was at school at least starting doing 4-5 A-Levels was really common. People who were struggling then might drop one after the first year. Also, there has always been UCAS grade / point system at was supposed to just require your best 3, but there was definitely a lot more positivity from university admissions when you were doing 4 or 5. Any more and I think they just thought you were weird and unncessary.
I encouraged my lad to do 4 A-levels, but he flatly refused, saying that the universities would only consider 3 and there was therefore no point in doing more. Instead, he used his spare time to learn everything he could about blockchain, cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance. When he had his interview to study E&M at Oxford, he was then able to talk knowledgeably and passionately about those fields and was subsequently offered a place.
So I guess I was proved wrong. It is perhaps better to study 3 A-levels and use the rest of your time to do something you are passionate about then to study additional A-levels.
My fourth was done 'for fun' - design and technology or whatever it was called then. Probably got me my first job, where at interview I was shown a technical drawing of a non-return valve and asked to identify it and explain what it did and also an electrical circuit diagram and asked to find the safety issue (switch was on neutral line, so load would stay live if switched off). I drew on that A level from four years before to answer those. I'd maybe have learned the electrical stuff in my spare time, but probably not the technical drawing.
Q. What does the poet mean by x? A. Who knows? If he wanted to communicate what he meant, he would have written a concise essay, setting out his views and his reasons for them. Instead, he has vomited a lot of words on the page which neither rhyme nor scan and the meaning of which is shrouded in gnomic metaphor.
I can also confirm that the poetry studied at GCSE is woke.
That is a bit like studying a painting via chemical analysis of the pigments and the physics of the brush strokes. It completely misses the point.
Poetry, literature, film, art, music, religion etc are a different domain of knowledge and one not lending itself to binary answers. They are about interpretation, meaning, emotion and metaphor.
Fox jr2 wrote a very interesting defence of the actions of Othello in A level English, arguing that his violent behaviour was down to PTSD and that he should be regarded as a psychological casualty of war. It changed my perspective on the play. Is this a "Woke" analysis? Or one that rejects the "Woke" view of the patriarchy as intrinsically violent?
Our Chemistry A-level class was taken to the National Gallery precisely because chemical analysis of pigments and paints can tell you so much about a painting, particularly when time and chemistry has caused those pigments to change colour, which has led people to misinterpret paintings.
*cough*Mrs Thatcher was not going to double VAT (8 to 15 per cent so not quite double) and was going to reduce inflation (it went up, not least because of VAT) and unemployment (from 1 to 3 million)*cough*
But for decades if not centuries the phrase ‘political promise’ has been used ironically.
Yep, but the failure to hold a referendum had rather direct consequences. And it taught the electorate that there was a tiny sliver of a chance of ever getting one. It's one reason I did vote to leave because I knew there was no way we'd ever be granted the great privilege of having our opinions matter for anything EU-related ever again.
If we'd rejected Lisbon and that had stuck, it would've been a lot better for the country.
Maybe but by then the Lisbon treaty we would have had a referendum on had been rejected already by France and Ireland and drastically watered down so did not really count as a treaty. So what would we have had a referendum on, exactly? Maybe the government could have pulled its finger out earlier but it didn't and then it was too late, as David Cameron also acknowledged.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
When I was at school at least starting doing 4-5 A-Levels was really common. People who were struggling then might drop one after the first year. Also, there has always been UCAS grade / point system at was supposed to just require your best 3, but there was definitely a lot more positivity from university admissions when you were doing 4 or 5. Any more and I think they just thought you were weird and unncessary.
Recent trend seems to be schools pushing best possible grades in 3, presumably league table driven
One set of our grandchildren, resident in Thailand, do the International Baccalaureate. Think that means five subjects, plus a 'personal essay', and the overall result is reported as a points total. Eldest got enough points to get her into Melbourne Uni; the next is just finishing the exams and aiming for Sydney. England/Wales, they feel is too expensive.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
It's worse than people think, private sector workers are now seeing real terms wage contraction. The headline number being reported is only positive because Labour have been giving record pay rises to the state sector which is a transfer of wealth from productive parts of the economy to destructive public sectors.
Worse still over the year 190k fewer Brits are in employment and 770k foreigners have replaced them.
This is the ultimate source of Reform's strength and until this changes expect there to be a substantial number of people willing to give Reform and similar parties a fair hearing.
I think the next government will end up taking pretty drastic action and halt all but the most skilled immigration and end the student visa factories coupled with pretty drastic benefit cuts and eligibility changes for disability benefits. I don't see Reform or a Reform/Tory coalition allowing ADHD or depression for disability benefits.
No one in Britain should get social housing - certainly in places like central London - unless they were born in Britain. Anyone who has it, who isn’t British born, should be given a three year eviction notice
The total value of the subsidy (often monetised by subletting) must be enormous.
On Sunday Microsoft did one of their legendary forced updates. This was without my consent and has totally buggered my computer. It's now taking multiple times to boot due to issues with the SATA drive and it's randomly deleting all my passwords including for the user accounts.
So - I've had enough. THis is jsut ridiculous. And I can't get hold of the useless scum to complain.
I'd like to look at Linux as an alternative. Does anyone have any recommendations? Mostly personal with a heavy emphasis on video calls for business. Computer is high spec with 48gb of RAM and a modern processor that has a built in TPM.
Sadly not, video calls are the sort of thing no one using Linux cares about.
My advice nowadays is get a Mac - if you think Windows 11 is bad you haven’t seen 12 yet
Thanks, that's depressing to hear.
I have a mac. In fact, I have two, although both are rather elderly. Can Macs do major multiscreen setups now? That would be a requirement.
This hasn’t been my experience at all.
My wife (for reasons known only to herself - I was expecting her to use Windows!) chose to use the Linux install on our home PC for all her work from home days, much of which is spent video conferencing with work colleagues. There have been plenty of the usual “why am I muted? Oh, the microphone isn’t plugged in” issues that plague every video conferencing session ever, but the video conferencing itself has been seamless.
Yes. Rather unexpectedly, I've had no issues at all using Teams and Zoom on Ubuntu in recent years.
And you can try out Ubuntu from a USB stick before you touch the metal of your machine.
I think youth employment may see a sudden and significant short term increase.
Growing signs in Devon and Cornwall, specifically Torbay of a stay cation boom.
Concerns about Flights, Jet Fuel, Safety etc has seen what was sluggish and slow holiday occupancy rates June to October increase markedly in past few weeks.
Very significant trend too from 7 day bookings to long weekend and 4 day midweek bookings.
The Hospitality, Retail, Cleaning sector already starting to seek and advertise for summer staff having realised that their reduced staffing won't cope.
It could be a bumper summer for UK tourism IF the weather plays ball.
Mods - can I appeal for a ban on the term 'staycation' for anything other than a holiday where you stay in your own house? What Brixian appears to be describing is what many of us would describe as a 'holiday'.
I’m afraid that sluggish lexical diesel train has long ago left the station. Staycation now means a holiday in one’s own country, and it is useful - we didn’t have a single word for this common phenomenon. Literally holidaying in your home is much less common, so the demand for a word wasn’t there. The market always wins
Homestaycation? House-hols. Notgoingawaycation
When I was a kid, days in Rhyl were called holidays, days at home were usually called babysitting, and days abroad every called adventures...
I think Staycation started being a thing in the correct sense (of day trips from home) after the 2008 financial crash. That its become bastardised and used to represent something that very many people in this country call a holiday, is ludicrous. A staycation is a different thing to a holiday in the UK.
(And yes, I know that languages and usage evolve. Its just that this one should be de-evolved...)
I think it's been a deliberate campaign from the travel industry to adopt the word and use it to denigrate taking holidays domestically, as opposed to abroad.
I hate that the word has been misused in this way, but it is - literally - a lost cause.
Q. What does the poet mean by x? A. Who knows? If he wanted to communicate what he meant, he would have written a concise essay, setting out his views and his reasons for them. Instead, he has vomited a lot of words on the page which neither rhyme nor scan and the meaning of which is shrouded in gnomic metaphor.
I can also confirm that the poetry studied at GCSE is woke.
That is a bit like studying a painting via chemical analysis of the pigments and the physics of the brush strokes. It completely misses the point.
Poetry, literature, film, art, music, religion etc are a different domain of knowledge and one not lending itself to binary answers. They are about interpretation, meaning, emotion and metaphor.
Fox jr2 wrote a very interesting defence of the actions of Othello in A level English, arguing that his violent behaviour was down to PTSD and that he should be regarded as a psychological casualty of war. It changed my perspective on the play. Is this a "Woke" analysis? Or one that rejects the "Woke" view of the patriarchy as intrinsically violent?
Our Chemistry A-level class was taken to the National Gallery precisely because chemical analysis of pigments and paints can tell you so much about a painting, particularly when time and chemistry has caused those pigments to change colour, which has led people to misinterpret paintings.
I am not saying that paint analysis is valueless, just that it should not be the only way to look at a painting.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
NB. Since we’re talking jobs I am very happy to report that the three month contract my eldest was given by the local metallurgy outfit has just been converted to a full time role!
The resulting levels of parental relief are probably palpable from orbit.
That's great. It's a real worry when they are struggling just to get an 'in'. My son after uni and law conversion could find nothing for almost a year. This was back in 2011. Eventually he got a temp thing at the BoE. It was nothing special, not with graduate trainee status or anything, but it got him going and he's parleyed it up into a good career. Doing very well now.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
It's worse than people think, private sector workers are now seeing real terms wage contraction. The headline number being reported is only positive because Labour have been giving record pay rises to the state sector which is a transfer of wealth from productive parts of the economy to destructive public sectors.
Worse still over the year 190k fewer Brits are in employment and 770k foreigners have replaced them.
This is the ultimate source of Reform's strength and until this changes expect there to be a substantial number of people willing to give Reform and similar parties a fair hearing.
I think the next government will end up taking pretty drastic action and halt all but the most skilled immigration and end the student visa factories coupled with pretty drastic benefit cuts and eligibility changes for disability benefits. I don't see Reform or a Reform/Tory coalition allowing ADHD or depression for disability benefits.
No one in Britain should get social housing - certainly in places like central London - unless they were born in Britain. Anyone who has it, who isn’t British born, should be given a three year eviction notice
I think a suitably long qualification period of 25 years in full time employment would do it.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
THERE ARE NO BLOODY JOBS
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
Yes I voted for it. And it’s a fucking catastrophe
Good morning
I and many others, no doubt including yourself, were misled by Starmer thinking that he would uphold the highest of standards and be in the forefront of change
And yet within weeks, we learned he was having his clothes, glasses, football tickets and other freebies bought and given to him, then it went on to the catastrophic WFA error (similar to the Poll tax error) followed by 16 plus u turns, allowed his chancellor to produce a job destroying budget, and the mother of all the mistakes in thinking it would be good to have Mandelson as our US Ambassador and failing to accept responsibility by firing almost anyone or everyone associated with it and thought that he could survive this act of utter hypocrisy, not least with his demands that Johnson resigns
Labour's civil war is ultimately Starmer's responsibility and he needs to accept his role and resign leaving office in as dignified way possible
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
It's worse than people think, private sector workers are now seeing real terms wage contraction. The headline number being reported is only positive because Labour have been giving record pay rises to the state sector which is a transfer of wealth from productive parts of the economy to destructive public sectors.
Worse still over the year 190k fewer Brits are in employment and 770k foreigners have replaced them.
This is the ultimate source of Reform's strength and until this changes expect there to be a substantial number of people willing to give Reform and similar parties a fair hearing.
I think the next government will end up taking pretty drastic action and halt all but the most skilled immigration and end the student visa factories coupled with pretty drastic benefit cuts and eligibility changes for disability benefits. I don't see Reform or a Reform/Tory coalition allowing ADHD or depression for disability benefits.
No one in Britain should get social housing - certainly in places like central London - unless they were born in Britain. Anyone who has it, who isn’t British born, should be given a three year eviction notice
I think a suitably long qualification period of 25 years in full time employment would do it.
Surely 25 years in full time employment should obviate the need for Social Housing? At least it should in a society that pays a decent wage.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
It's worse than people think, private sector workers are now seeing real terms wage contraction. The headline number being reported is only positive because Labour have been giving record pay rises to the state sector which is a transfer of wealth from productive parts of the economy to destructive public sectors.
Worse still over the year 190k fewer Brits are in employment and 770k foreigners have replaced them.
This is the ultimate source of Reform's strength and until this changes expect there to be a substantial number of people willing to give Reform and similar parties a fair hearing.
I think the next government will end up taking pretty drastic action and halt all but the most skilled immigration and end the student visa factories coupled with pretty drastic benefit cuts and eligibility changes for disability benefits. I don't see Reform or a Reform/Tory coalition allowing ADHD or depression for disability benefits.
No one in Britain should get social housing - certainly in places like central London - unless they were born in Britain. Anyone who has it, who isn’t British born, should be given a three year eviction notice
The total value of the subsidy (often monetised by subletting) must be enormous.
How are non-citizens entitled to any government support in the first place?
Back to local by-elections this Thursday. Quite an interesting set with no Lab, Con, or Ref defences. We have a LD defence in Dorset, a Ind defence in Fylde, a Green defence in Lancaster, and a Malvern Hills Ind defence in, obviously, Malvern Hills.
Q. What does the poet mean by x? A. Who knows? If he wanted to communicate what he meant, he would have written a concise essay, setting out his views and his reasons for them. Instead, he has vomited a lot of words on the page which neither rhyme nor scan and the meaning of which is shrouded in gnomic metaphor.
I can also confirm that the poetry studied at GCSE is woke.
That is a bit like studying a painting via chemical analysis of the pigments and the physics of the brush strokes. It completely misses the point.
Poetry, literature, film, art, music, religion etc are a different domain of knowledge and one not lending itself to binary answers. They are about interpretation, meaning, emotion and metaphor.
Fox jr2 wrote a very interesting defence of the actions of Othello in A level English, arguing that his violent behaviour was down to PTSD and that he should be regarded as a psychological casualty of war. It changed my perspective on the play. Is this a "Woke" analysis? Or one that rejects the "Woke" view of the patriarchy as intrinsically violent?
Our Chemistry A-level class was taken to the National Gallery precisely because chemical analysis of pigments and paints can tell you so much about a painting, particularly when time and chemistry has caused those pigments to change colour, which has led people to misinterpret paintings.
The most 'interesting' thing we did in A level Chemistry was to make a small quantity of neat ethyl alcohol. We had to make a selection of chemicals during the two years and send them off to London Un's Examining Boardi as examples of our ability to use equipment, or something like that. Anyway, on the 'alcohol day' were were 'sort of' encouraged to bring in some orange juice and drink the surplus! There wasn't a lot, of course.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
THERE ARE NO BLOODY JOBS
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
Talking to academics over the past year or so, this is a topic that comes up time and time again, all their students are stressed, not about the coursework, about trying to get on a graduate scheme. Less jobs out there and of course AI have enabled everybody to write 100s of applications in no time that are of much higher standard than would be in the past.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
THERE ARE NO BLOODY JOBS
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
Which is why I suggested looking for a summer internship rather than a menial job. That's what my lad did after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company when he graduated last year.
NB. Since we’re talking jobs I am very happy to report that the three month contract my eldest was given by the local metallurgy outfit has just been converted to a full time role!
The resulting levels of parental relief are probably palpable from orbit.
That's great. It's a real worry when they are struggling just to get an 'in'. My son after uni and law conversion could find nothing for almost a year. This was back in 2011. Eventually he got a temp thing at the BoE. It was nothing special, not with graduate trainee status or anything, but it got him going and he's parleyed it up into a good career. Doing very well now.
It is incredibly tough when you’re applying and applying and getting no-where. If you don’t have a personal contact somewhere the flood of AI-driven applications is making recruitment a nightmare for both sides from what I hear.
Back to local by-elections this Thursday. Quite an interesting set with no Lab, Con, or Ref defences. We have a LD defence in Dorset, a Ind defence in Fylde, a Green defence in Lancaster, and a Malvern Hills Ind defence in, obviously, Malvern Hills.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
THERE ARE NO BLOODY JOBS
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
Which is why I suggested looking for a summer internship rather than a menial job. That's what my lad did after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company when he graduated last year.
Most internships schemes hire in the early spring. And again they are now super competitive (or at least the volume of applications is very high).
Q. What does the poet mean by x? A. Who knows? If he wanted to communicate what he meant, he would have written a concise essay, setting out his views and his reasons for them. Instead, he has vomited a lot of words on the page which neither rhyme nor scan and the meaning of which is shrouded in gnomic metaphor.
I can also confirm that the poetry studied at GCSE is woke.
That is a bit like studying a painting via chemical analysis of the pigments and the physics of the brush strokes. It completely misses the point.
Poetry, literature, film, art, music, religion etc are a different domain of knowledge and one not lending itself to binary answers. They are about interpretation, meaning, emotion and metaphor.
Fox jr2 wrote a very interesting defence of the actions of Othello in A level English, arguing that his violent behaviour was down to PTSD and that he should be regarded as a psychological casualty of war. It changed my perspective on the play. Is this a "Woke" analysis? Or one that rejects the "Woke" view of the patriarchy as intrinsically violent?
I very much used to hate the premise of English Lit. I tended to think that Shakespeare just sat down and wrote, and happened to be brilliant at it. He didn't worry about all the bullshit analysis that the Lit classes went into.
I have revised my opinion a bit now. I can understand that there is value in understanding WHY something works so well as a play, even if the playwright didn't ever think in those terms. However I also suspect that learning HOW does not then make writers better.
Its a bit like all those shit managers out there with Management degrees to prove that they know the theory.
Or my favourite - someone giving you a talk on how to give good presentations but it absolutely shit at them...
I also think it's a bit simplistic to think that Shakespeare just sat down and wrote. I haven't met this Shakespeare guy, but I know some writers and they are thinking about themes and metaphors and parallels to the real world and political references and obscure inside jokes when they write.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
THERE ARE NO BLOODY JOBS
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
Which is why I suggested looking for a summer internship rather than a menial job. That's what my lad did after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company when he graduated last year.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
When I was at school at least starting doing 4-5 A-Levels was really common. People who were struggling then might drop one after the first year. Also, there has always been UCAS grade / point system at was supposed to just require your best 3, but there was definitely a lot more positivity from university admissions when you were doing 4 or 5. Any more and I think they just thought you were weird and unncessary.
I encouraged my lad to do 4 A-levels, but he flatly refused, saying that the universities would only consider 3 and there was therefore no point in doing more. Instead, he used his spare time to learn everything he could about blockchain, cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance. When he had his interview to study E&M at Oxford, he was then able to talk knowledgeably and passionately about those fields and was subsequently offered a place.
So I guess I was proved wrong. It is perhaps better to study 3 A-levels and use the rest of your time to do something you are passionate about then to study additional A-levels.
My fourth was done 'for fun' - design and technology or whatever it was called then. Probably got me my first job, where at interview I was shown a technical drawing of a non-return valve and asked to identify it and explain what it did and also an electrical circuit diagram and asked to find the safety issue (switch was on neutral line, so load would stay live if switched off). I drew on that A level from four years before to answer those. I'd maybe have learned the electrical stuff in my spare time, but probably not the technical drawing.
My son has split his A levels. He did Geography and Finance last year and is doing Maths and Physics this year. And after all that he got an unconditional offer from Portsmouth to do Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
THERE ARE NO BLOODY JOBS
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
Which is why I suggested looking for a summer internship rather than a menial job. That's what my lad did after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company when he graduated last year.
Most internships schemes hire in the early spring. And again they are now super competitive (or at least the volume of applications is very high).
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
The issue with Linux on the desktop is what I call the showstopper problem. You install Linux, it looks great and works fine for lots of stuff - then you try something that was trivial and Windows and it just won't work no matter what you do.
I've been running Linux on at least one PC for over 20 years, and actually did some kernel development in the early 2000s, but I'm still on Windows for my main desktop precisely because of this.
I switched the PC I use for 3D printing to Linux and had to go back to Windows because Ubuntu couldn't run the Linux version of the slicer software (OrcaSlicer - a modern open-source package). The provided appimage package didn't work at all and building from source errored out.
It was quicker to re-install Windows, download the EXE and it just worked.
I suspect the only area where Linux will actually take a bite out of Windows is gaming, thanks to all the hard work done by Valve on Win32/64 compatibility.
But when polled, nobody seems to knows who Rupet Lowe is. YouGov is online surveying, Restore seems to be online right wing mano-sphere influencer hobby horse. I wonder if this number is picking up terminal online types and overemphasising their support.
Or whether people like the name.
If you stuck a made-up party with a funky name in the poll ("Renew Britain"), would it get 4%?
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
When I was at school at least starting doing 4-5 A-Levels was really common. People who were struggling then might drop one after the first year. Also, there has always been UCAS grade / point system at was supposed to just require your best 3, but there was definitely a lot more positivity from university admissions when you were doing 4 or 5. Any more and I think they just thought you were weird and unncessary.
I encouraged my lad to do 4 A-levels, but he flatly refused, saying that the universities would only consider 3 and there was therefore no point in doing more. Instead, he used his spare time to learn everything he could about blockchain, cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance. When he had his interview to study E&M at Oxford, he was then able to talk knowledgeably and passionately about those fields and was subsequently offered a place.
So I guess I was proved wrong. It is perhaps better to study 3 A-levels and use the rest of your time to do something you are passionate about then to study additional A-levels.
My fourth was done 'for fun' - design and technology or whatever it was called then. Probably got me my first job, where at interview I was shown a technical drawing of a non-return valve and asked to identify it and explain what it did and also an electrical circuit diagram and asked to find the safety issue (switch was on neutral line, so load would stay live if switched off). I drew on that A level from four years before to answer those. I'd maybe have learned the electrical stuff in my spare time, but probably not the technical drawing.
My son has split his A levels. He did Geography and Finance last year and is doing Maths and Physics this year. And after all that he got an unconditional offer from Portsmouth to do Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
When I was at school at least starting doing 4-5 A-Levels was really common. People who were struggling then might drop one after the first year. Also, there has always been UCAS grade / point system at was supposed to just require your best 3, but there was definitely a lot more positivity from university admissions when you were doing 4 or 5. Any more and I think they just thought you were weird and unncessary.
I encouraged my lad to do 4 A-levels, but he flatly refused, saying that the universities would only consider 3 and there was therefore no point in doing more. Instead, he used his spare time to learn everything he could about blockchain, cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance. When he had his interview to study E&M at Oxford, he was then able to talk knowledgeably and passionately about those fields and was subsequently offered a place.
So I guess I was proved wrong. It is perhaps better to study 3 A-levels and use the rest of your time to do something you are passionate about then to study additional A-levels.
My fourth was done 'for fun' - design and technology or whatever it was called then. Probably got me my first job, where at interview I was shown a technical drawing of a non-return valve and asked to identify it and explain what it did and also an electrical circuit diagram and asked to find the safety issue (switch was on neutral line, so load would stay live if switched off). I drew on that A level from four years before to answer those. I'd maybe have learned the electrical stuff in my spare time, but probably not the technical drawing.
My son has split his A levels. He did Geography and Finance last year and is doing Maths and Physics this year. And after all that he got an unconditional offer from Portsmouth to do Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology
That sounds like an awesome course!
I did Physics with Astrophysics, and the course also included a large helping of cosmology. It was indeed awesome
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
THERE ARE NO BLOODY JOBS
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
Which is why I suggested looking for a summer internship rather than a menial job. That's what my lad did after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company when he graduated last year.
Most internships schemes hire in the early spring. And again they are now super competitive (or at least the volume of applications is very high).
Grandson 2 left Manchester with a 2:1 in History two years ago and found nothing. So he got a three year work visa in Australia and is currently a bar manager or similar on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. No idea what he'll do when the three year are over. Or whether he'll stay in hospitality.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
THERE ARE NO BLOODY JOBS
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
Which is why I suggested looking for a summer internship rather than a menial job. That's what my lad did after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company when he graduated last year.
Most internships schemes hire in the early spring. And again they are now super competitive (or at least the volume of applications is very high).
Yeah, true, it's probably too late now.
One option is cold calling the right person in a smaller firm. You never know they might have won a new contract or something and are in the process of hiring but will take them 2-3 months to find the right people and are like well we have a load of "annoying" tasks that could really helpful if they get done before they go all-in with new employees.
I once got a job a bit like that. They had won a new contract and hadn't yet really got around to planning out new staffing etc and were like ok, why not, come and code out all this stuff so we can then starting automating more of our testing will be really useful in a few months time.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Right and wrong answers in History?
There are historical facts which cannot be disputed, eg The French won a decisive victory over the Spanish at Tudela on 23rd November 1808, or the Red Army won the Battle of Berlin, on 2nd May 1945, or Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust.
But, there are also plenty of colourable hypotheses. For example, the Browning/Goldhagen debate of the 1990's. Goldhagen argued that Germany was, as a nation, uniquely prone to murderous anti-semitism. Browning argued that Reserve Police Battalion 101, which shot and rounded up tens of thousands of Jews was comprised of "ordinary men", absolutely unremarkable people; men who were, in no way, pathological, or unusually bigoted. The implication of that argument is that mass murder of a hated group is something that could be perpetrated in almost any society.
To my mind, Browning got the better of that debate, but one could still reasonably argue to the contrary.
I am old enough to have done O-levels and one of my books for English Literature O-level was Siegfried Sassoon's "Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man." Somehow I don't think that is on any curriculum now, although as Sassoon was bisexual, he might be considered "woke" enough.
But when polled, nobody seems to knows who Rupet Lowe is. YouGov is online surveying, Restore seems to be online right wing mano-sphere influencer hobby horse. I wonder if this number is picking up terminal online types and overemphasising their support.
Or whether people like the name.
If you stuck a made-up party with a funky name in the poll ("Renew Britain"), would it get 4%?
Yes. Always remember in a poll sometime ago 4% of people claimed they had been decapitated. A combination of idiots and people messing with those carrying out the poll.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
The issue with Linux on the desktop is what I call the showstopper problem. You install Linux, it looks great and works fine for lots of stuff - then you try something that was trivial and Windows and it just won't work no matter what you do.
I've been running Linux on at least one PC for over 20 years, and actually did some kernel development in the early 2000s, but I'm still on Windows for my main desktop precisely because of this.
I switched the PC I use for 3D printing to Linux and had to go back to Windows because Ubuntu couldn't run the Linux version of the slicer software (OrcaSlicer - a modern open-source package). The provided appimage package didn't work at all and building from source errored out.
It was quicker to re-install Windows, download the EXE and it just worked.
I suspect the only area where Linux will actually take a bite out of Windows is gaming, thanks to all the hard work done by Valve on Win32/64 compatibility.
Which part doesn't work? There's a Flatpak package and that does run at least (I just tried it).
I am old enough to have done O-levels and one of my books for English Literature O-level was Siegfried Sassoon's "Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man." Somehow I don't think that is on any curriculum now, although as Sassoon was bisexual, he might be considered "woke" enough.
I remember when I did English A Level, you had people complaining that the Miller's Tale was far too filthy to be on the curriculum.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
The issue with Linux on the desktop is what I call the showstopper problem. You install Linux, it looks great and works fine for lots of stuff - then you try something that was trivial and Windows and it just won't work no matter what you do.
I've been running Linux on at least one PC for over 20 years, and actually did some kernel development in the early 2000s, but I'm still on Windows for my main desktop precisely because of this.
I switched the PC I use for 3D printing to Linux and had to go back to Windows because Ubuntu couldn't run the Linux version of the slicer software (OrcaSlicer - a modern open-source package). The provided appimage package didn't work at all and building from source errored out.
It was quicker to re-install Windows, download the EXE and it just worked.
I suspect the only area where Linux will actually take a bite out of Windows is gaming, thanks to all the hard work done by Valve on Win32/64 compatibility.
Agree on the last point. There's so many gamers I know who can't wait to get rid of Windows on their gaming PCs.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
It's worse than people think, private sector workers are now seeing real terms wage contraction. The headline number being reported is only positive because Labour have been giving record pay rises to the state sector which is a transfer of wealth from productive parts of the economy to destructive public sectors.
Worse still over the year 190k fewer Brits are in employment and 770k foreigners have replaced them.
This is the ultimate source of Reform's strength and until this changes expect there to be a substantial number of people willing to give Reform and similar parties a fair hearing.
I think the next government will end up taking pretty drastic action and halt all but the most skilled immigration and end the student visa factories coupled with pretty drastic benefit cuts and eligibility changes for disability benefits. I don't see Reform or a Reform/Tory coalition allowing ADHD or depression for disability benefits.
No one in Britain should get social housing - certainly in places like central London - unless they were born in Britain. Anyone who has it, who isn’t British born, should be given a three year eviction notice
The total value of the subsidy (often monetised by subletting) must be enormous.
How are non-citizens entitled to any government support in the first place?
So, you think we should withdraw all support from Ukrainian refugees in the UK?
Given how few Lib Dem and Green votes there are to squeeze in Makerfield, that may not help Labour much, there. Assuming that without Burnham, Reform would be polling about 50% in that seat, for them to keep 84% would imply a tight contest.
One bit of advice I always give to people. Don't just write an email to HR department of a company, you are going to get the standard response either we have a job / scheme its on the website, or no nothing available.
The people to find say in tech are people like the head of R&D, 1 or 2 steps below the CTO. They are the people tasked with actually getting the shit done and know where they are at with ongoing projects. And then you want a polite open email to them and if you have done some project that is relevant / really interesting, send a link to project page.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
It's worse than people think, private sector workers are now seeing real terms wage contraction. The headline number being reported is only positive because Labour have been giving record pay rises to the state sector which is a transfer of wealth from productive parts of the economy to destructive public sectors.
Worse still over the year 190k fewer Brits are in employment and 770k foreigners have replaced them.
This is the ultimate source of Reform's strength and until this changes expect there to be a substantial number of people willing to give Reform and similar parties a fair hearing.
I think the next government will end up taking pretty drastic action and halt all but the most skilled immigration and end the student visa factories coupled with pretty drastic benefit cuts and eligibility changes for disability benefits. I don't see Reform or a Reform/Tory coalition allowing ADHD or depression for disability benefits.
No one in Britain should get social housing - certainly in places like central London - unless they were born in Britain. Anyone who has it, who isn’t British born, should be given a three year eviction notice
The total value of the subsidy (often monetised by subletting) must be enormous.
This focus on devious grifting foreigners cheating native Brits is pure distraction from the real problem. The real problem is an economic model that fosters and tolerates sickening levels of inequality.
We have people in this country who spend more on treats for their dog than somebody on a low wage has to live on. It's a scandal. This is what we are 'mugs' for putting up with.
The populist right, the Trumps and Farages of this world, make out they're on the side of those on the wrong side of the system - but do we see lurid exposees from them of the worst examples of inequality along with tubthumping calls to sort it out? No we don't.
Why? Because the people fronting and running those outfits are ardent supporters of the status quo, in fact would implement policies to push it even further towards the interests of the rich and powerful.
So what they do, what they always do, is try and focus the anger of people who are struggling to get by onto minority groups, many of whom are even less well off. It's a well worn tactic. Well worn for the simple reason that sadly and often it works.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Right and wrong answers in History?
There are historical facts which cannot be disputed, eg The French won a decisive victory over the Spanish at Tudela on 23rd November 1808, or the Red Army won the Battle of Berlin, on 2nd May 1945, or Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust.
But, there are also plenty of colourable hypotheses. For example, the Browning/Goldhagen debate of the 1990's. Goldhagen argued that Germany was, as a nation, uniquely prone to murderous anti-semitism. Browning argued that Reserve Police Battalion 101, which shot and rounded up tens of thousands of Jews was comprised of "ordinary men", absolutely unremarkable people; men who were, in no way, pathological, or unusually bigoted. The implication of that argument is that mass murder of a hated group is something that could be perpetrated in almost any society.
To my mind, Browning got the better of that debate, but one could still reasonably argue to the contrary.
I always remember someone saying that in French history books the Battle of Trafalgar was a minor naval skirmish where a British admiral was killed.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Right and wrong answers in History?
There are historical facts which cannot be disputed, eg The French won a decisive victory over the Spanish at Tudela on 23rd November 1808, or the Red Army won the Battle of Berlin, on 2nd May 1945, or Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust.
But, there are also plenty of colourable hypotheses. For example, the Browning/Goldhagen debate of the 1990's. Goldhagen argued that Germany was, as a nation, uniquely prone to murderous anti-semitism. Browning argued that Reserve Police Battalion 101, which shot and rounded up tens of thousands of Jews was comprised of "ordinary men", absolutely unremarkable people; men who were, in no way, pathological, or unusually bigoted. The implication of that argument is that mass murder of a hated group is something that could be perpetrated in almost any society.
To my mind, Browning got the better of that debate, but one could still reasonably argue to the contrary.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
The issue with Linux on the desktop is what I call the showstopper problem. You install Linux, it looks great and works fine for lots of stuff - then you try something that was trivial and Windows and it just won't work no matter what you do.
I've been running Linux on at least one PC for over 20 years, and actually did some kernel development in the early 2000s, but I'm still on Windows for my main desktop precisely because of this.
I switched the PC I use for 3D printing to Linux and had to go back to Windows because Ubuntu couldn't run the Linux version of the slicer software (OrcaSlicer - a modern open-source package). The provided appimage package didn't work at all and building from source errored out.
It was quicker to re-install Windows, download the EXE and it just worked.
I suspect the only area where Linux will actually take a bite out of Windows is gaming, thanks to all the hard work done by Valve on Win32/64 compatibility.
As an aside: It is deeply susicious that there are four “Orca Slicer” websites at the top of the Google results, all of which return different domains.
The Github repo also doesn’t point to the top result, which is a bad look.
It’s symptomatic of the state of the current web that Google apparently can’t distinguish between these websites, some of which look incredibly scammy. I wouldn’t trust them at all, but I bet a lot of users just click on one of these results without realising that the Orca Slicer devs have nothing to do with them.
So if Burnham wins the Makerfield by election it looks like he is the Messiah in the eyes of Labour members, their Boris to Starmer’s May. The only man to beat Farage as for Tory members in 2019 Boris was the only man who could beat Corbyn.
Streeting meanwhile looks like a Labour Heseltine or Sunak, their assassin of the leadership of a PM unpopular in the polls but who did not get the crown in the subsequent leadership election. Streeting may take some comfort though from the fact Rishi ultimately got the PM gig after the darling of the Tory membership in 2022, Liz Truss, pursued an economic policy that crashed the markets. Hence Burnham aides already briefing he will be more cautious than she was
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Morning all! Cloudy and drizzly here this morning.Although our jobbing gardener has now taken off her hat, so the drizzle must have stopped!
I did, and passed, both Eng Lang and Litt and thoroughly enjoyed the latter. However my father (this was back in the 50's) insisted that science was the way forward so I'd picked the science stream two years earlier, and thus the die for my A levels was cast.
Up to the age of 16 I was expected and planned to be a doctor except I really didn’t want to be a doctor, so I spoke to my father and agreed I wouldn’t do A-Level Biology, and chose History instead.
I never heard of anyone at my school (as I said back in the '50's) swapping streams. One picked at 14, either Geography, History, and Latin or Biology, Chemistry and Physics, plus of course Maths, the two Englishes, French and either German or Spanish. And that was that.
It is still a depressingly narrow choice post-16 and schools seem to be encouraging 3 rather than 4 A levels
When I was at school at least starting doing 4-5 A-Levels was really common. People who were struggling then might drop one after the first year. Also, there has always been UCAS grade / point system at was supposed to just require your best 3, but there was definitely a lot more positivity from university admissions when you were doing 4 or 5. Any more and I think they just thought you were weird and unncessary.
I encouraged my lad to do 4 A-levels, but he flatly refused, saying that the universities would only consider 3 and there was therefore no point in doing more. Instead, he used his spare time to learn everything he could about blockchain, cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance. When he had his interview to study E&M at Oxford, he was then able to talk knowledgeably and passionately about those fields and was subsequently offered a place.
So I guess I was proved wrong. It is perhaps better to study 3 A-levels and use the rest of your time to do something you are passionate about then to study additional A-levels.
My fourth was done 'for fun' - design and technology or whatever it was called then. Probably got me my first job, where at interview I was shown a technical drawing of a non-return valve and asked to identify it and explain what it did and also an electrical circuit diagram and asked to find the safety issue (switch was on neutral line, so load would stay live if switched off). I drew on that A level from four years before to answer those. I'd maybe have learned the electrical stuff in my spare time, but probably not the technical drawing.
My son has split his A levels. He did Geography and Finance last year and is doing Maths and Physics this year. And after all that he got an unconditional offer from Portsmouth to do Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology
That sounds like an awesome course!
When we went for the open day they were explaining their main research project is looking at colliding neutron stars to detect gravitational waves.
Given how few Lib Dem and Green votes there are to squeeze in Makerfield, that may not help Labour much, there. Assuming that without Burnham, Reform would be polling about 50% in that seat, for them to keep 84% would imply a tight contest.
More LD voters would tactically vote for Burnham than the LD candidate in Makerfield though. Bad news for Reform in that most Tory voters would vote for the Conservative candidate rather than tactically vote Reform. Indeed more Green voters would tactically vote for Burnham than Tory voters would tactically vote Reform
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
It's worse than people think, private sector workers are now seeing real terms wage contraction. The headline number being reported is only positive because Labour have been giving record pay rises to the state sector which is a transfer of wealth from productive parts of the economy to destructive public sectors.
Worse still over the year 190k fewer Brits are in employment and 770k foreigners have replaced them.
This is the ultimate source of Reform's strength and until this changes expect there to be a substantial number of people willing to give Reform and similar parties a fair hearing.
I think the next government will end up taking pretty drastic action and halt all but the most skilled immigration and end the student visa factories coupled with pretty drastic benefit cuts and eligibility changes for disability benefits. I don't see Reform or a Reform/Tory coalition allowing ADHD or depression for disability benefits.
No one in Britain should get social housing - certainly in places like central London - unless they were born in Britain. Anyone who has it, who isn’t British born, should be given a three year eviction notice
The total value of the subsidy (often monetised by subletting) must be enormous.
This focus on devious grifting foreigners cheating native Brits is pure distraction from the real problem. The real problem is an economic model that fosters and tolerates sickening levels of inequality.
We have people in this country who spend more on treats for their dog than somebody on a low wage has to live on. It's a scandal. This is what we are 'mugs' for putting up with.
The populist right, the Trumps and Farages of this world, make out they're on the side of those on the wrong side of the system - but do we see lurid exposees from them of the worst examples of inequality along with tubthumping calls to sort it out? No we don't.
Why? Because the people fronting and running those outfits are ardent supporters of the status quo, in fact would implement policies to push it even further towards the interests of the rich and powerful.
So what they do, what they always do, is try and focus the anger of people who are struggling to get by onto minority groups, many of whom are even less well off. It's a well worn tactic. Well worn for the simple reason that sadly and often it works.
You know you could move out of London if the sight of people spending so much on conspicuous consumption sickens you?
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
The issue with Linux on the desktop is what I call the showstopper problem. You install Linux, it looks great and works fine for lots of stuff - then you try something that was trivial and Windows and it just won't work no matter what you do.
I've been running Linux on at least one PC for over 20 years, and actually did some kernel development in the early 2000s, but I'm still on Windows for my main desktop precisely because of this.
I switched the PC I use for 3D printing to Linux and had to go back to Windows because Ubuntu couldn't run the Linux version of the slicer software (OrcaSlicer - a modern open-source package). The provided appimage package didn't work at all and building from source errored out.
It was quicker to re-install Windows, download the EXE and it just worked.
I suspect the only area where Linux will actually take a bite out of Windows is gaming, thanks to all the hard work done by Valve on Win32/64 compatibility.
Agree on the last point. There's so many gamers I know who can't wait to get rid of Windows on their gaming PCs.
My impression is that for everything except a few multi-player games where the developer or publisher refuses to flip the “Linux support” switch on their anti-cheat engine (look at you Epic) Linux support in the gaming world is now almost universal thanks to Valve’s efforts.
I have a Steam Deck & I don’t even think about whether a game will work on it these days. I haven’t had anything refuse to run in years. Often there’s a native Linux build that runs in one of Valve‘s Linux runtimes but if not the Windows build works flawlessly in the Windows API layer (Proton / Wine) anyway.
People have been packaging up Valve’s OS for installation onto standard PCs - it’s really a seamless experience that’s better than Windows at this point.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander is expected to confirm that HS2 trains will run slower than initially planned, in a bid to cut costs
So we save what 0.5% of the project cost which will then be spent elsewhere - the whole point of the speed was that it provided a sensible turn round time against a timetable so we needed fewer platforms at both ends
Edit the speed partly came from if we do it in x minutes we can get away with 4 platforms rather than 8.
I think you save an enormous amount if you accept lower speed because the route doesn't have to be so straight. I'm sure one of the train folk will correct me if I've got that wrong.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
THERE ARE NO BLOODY JOBS
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
Which is why sanctioning those on benefits is stupid. Either they are trying to get jobs in which case it is unfair to punish them, or they do not want to work in which case they are freeing up jobs for those who want them.
Back to local by-elections this Thursday. Quite an interesting set with no Lab, Con, or Ref defences. We have a LD defence in Dorset, a Ind defence in Fylde, a Green defence in Lancaster, and a Malvern Hills Ind defence in, obviously, Malvern Hills.
There 18 or so on June 18th!
is that when the Reform paper candidates who've had to resign pop up?
Will any council control depend upon those outcomes do we know?
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Right and wrong answers in History?
There are historical facts which cannot be disputed, eg The French won a decisive victory over the Spanish at Tudela on 23rd November 1808, or the Red Army won the Battle of Berlin, on 2nd May 1945, or Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust.
But, there are also plenty of colourable hypotheses. For example, the Browning/Goldhagen debate of the 1990's. Goldhagen argued that Germany was, as a nation, uniquely prone to murderous anti-semitism. Browning argued that Reserve Police Battalion 101, which shot and rounded up tens of thousands of Jews was comprised of "ordinary men", absolutely unremarkable people; men who were, in no way, pathological, or unusually bigoted. The implication of that argument is that mass murder of a hated group is something that could be perpetrated in almost any society.
To my mind, Browning got the better of that debate, but one could still reasonably argue to the contrary.
Browning was right.
Look at Britain in the last few years.
Just listened to Sandy Toksvig's "Hitler's Canary" as an audio book. Semi fictional account of her father during the war helping Jews escape to Sweden. It depicts lots of the Germans as wanting nothing to do with the persecution of Jews and even actively trying to thwart it.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Right and wrong answers in History?
There are historical facts which cannot be disputed, eg The French won a decisive victory over the Spanish at Tudela on 23rd November 1808, or the Red Army won the Battle of Berlin, on 2nd May 1945, or Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust.
But, there are also plenty of colourable hypotheses. For example, the Browning/Goldhagen debate of the 1990's. Goldhagen argued that Germany was, as a nation, uniquely prone to murderous anti-semitism. Browning argued that Reserve Police Battalion 101, which shot and rounded up tens of thousands of Jews was comprised of "ordinary men", absolutely unremarkable people; men who were, in no way, pathological, or unusually bigoted. The implication of that argument is that mass murder of a hated group is something that could be perpetrated in almost any society.
To my mind, Browning got the better of that debate, but one could still reasonably argue to the contrary.
I wonder if anyone has proposed the theory that a culturally German element in Zionism has contributed to the murderous aspects of the Israeli state?
NB. Since we’re talking jobs I am very happy to report that the three month contract my eldest was given by the local metallurgy outfit has just been converted to a full time role!
The resulting levels of parental relief are probably palpable from orbit.
That's great. It's a real worry when they are struggling just to get an 'in'. My son after uni and law conversion could find nothing for almost a year. This was back in 2011. Eventually he got a temp thing at the BoE. It was nothing special, not with graduate trainee status or anything, but it got him going and he's parleyed it up into a good career. Doing very well now.
It is incredibly tough when you’re applying and applying and getting no-where. If you don’t have a personal contact somewhere the flood of AI-driven applications is making recruitment a nightmare for both sides from what I hear.
Yes, contacts are incredibly important and you're less likely to have them when you're young and getting started.
Enzo Maresca to take over at Man City from Pep. Bold decision given I seemed to remember Leciester fans were not exactly keen on the style of football he insisted on playing and at Chelsea he hardly set the world alight.
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Right and wrong answers in History?
There are historical facts which cannot be disputed, eg The French won a decisive victory over the Spanish at Tudela on 23rd November 1808, or the Red Army won the Battle of Berlin, on 2nd May 1945, or Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust.
But, there are also plenty of colourable hypotheses. For example, the Browning/Goldhagen debate of the 1990's. Goldhagen argued that Germany was, as a nation, uniquely prone to murderous anti-semitism. Browning argued that Reserve Police Battalion 101, which shot and rounded up tens of thousands of Jews was comprised of "ordinary men", absolutely unremarkable people; men who were, in no way, pathological, or unusually bigoted. The implication of that argument is that mass murder of a hated group is something that could be perpetrated in almost any society.
To my mind, Browning got the better of that debate, but one could still reasonably argue to the contrary.
Browning was right.
Look at Britain in the last few years.
An online friend of mine grew up with a very kind neighbour who had served in Vietnam. She once commented on the bits of dried apple he had hanging around a picture in the hallway. It turned out, they were actually dried ears, belonging to someone called "Charlie".
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
The issue with Linux on the desktop is what I call the showstopper problem. You install Linux, it looks great and works fine for lots of stuff - then you try something that was trivial and Windows and it just won't work no matter what you do.
I've been running Linux on at least one PC for over 20 years, and actually did some kernel development in the early 2000s, but I'm still on Windows for my main desktop precisely because of this.
I switched the PC I use for 3D printing to Linux and had to go back to Windows because Ubuntu couldn't run the Linux version of the slicer software (OrcaSlicer - a modern open-source package). The provided appimage package didn't work at all and building from source errored out.
It was quicker to re-install Windows, download the EXE and it just worked.
I suspect the only area where Linux will actually take a bite out of Windows is gaming, thanks to all the hard work done by Valve on Win32/64 compatibility.
Agree on the last point. There's so many gamers I know who can't wait to get rid of Windows on their gaming PCs.
My impression is that for everything except a few multi-player games where the developer or publisher refuses to flip the “Linux support” switch on their anti-cheat engine (look at you Epic) Linux support in the gaming world is now almost universal thanks to Valve’s efforts.
I have a Steam Deck & I don’t even think about whether a game will work on it these days. I haven’t had anything refuse to run in years. Often there’s a native Linux build that runs in one of Valve‘s Linux runtimes but if not the Windows build works flawlessly in the Windows API layer (Proton / Wine) anyway.
People have been packaging up Valve’s OS for installation onto standard PCs - it’s really a seamless experience that’s better than Windows at this point.
Yeah though Valve are working with anti-cheat companies to integrate them into SteamOS so we may end up getting a solution that publishers are happy with native to SteamOS if Valve can get something worked out.
I was just saying to some of my friends that I'm probably not going to bother with a PS6 and will just get a Steam Deck 2, it's just so much more versatile and I trust Valve a lot more when it comes to a digital library than Sony.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
The issue with Linux on the desktop is what I call the showstopper problem. You install Linux, it looks great and works fine for lots of stuff - then you try something that was trivial and Windows and it just won't work no matter what you do.
I've been running Linux on at least one PC for over 20 years, and actually did some kernel development in the early 2000s, but I'm still on Windows for my main desktop precisely because of this.
I switched the PC I use for 3D printing to Linux and had to go back to Windows because Ubuntu couldn't run the Linux version of the slicer software (OrcaSlicer - a modern open-source package). The provided appimage package didn't work at all and building from source errored out.
It was quicker to re-install Windows, download the EXE and it just worked.
I suspect the only area where Linux will actually take a bite out of Windows is gaming, thanks to all the hard work done by Valve on Win32/64 compatibility.
Which part doesn't work? There's a Flatpak package and that does run at least (I just tried it).
This was about six months ago, the Flatpak wasn't available then. Just an appimage and source. The appimage wouldn’t even open on Ubuntu.
Enzo Maresca to take over at Man City from Pep. Bold decision given I seemed to remember Leciester fans were not exactly keen on the style of football he insisted on playing and at Chelsea he hardly set the world alight.
But Maresca is such a look-alike, they will hardly notice Pep has gone.
I wonder if Pep will have timed his departure perfectly. There must come a time soon at which City get a 100 point deduction for their various infringements...
Enzo Maresca to take over at Man City from Pep. Bold decision given I seemed to remember Leciester fans were not exactly keen on the style of football he insisted on playing and at Chelsea he hardly set the world alight.
To all Man City fans. you've had a great run. Lots of money spent, of course, but a great manager, some amazing players and a brilliantly successful decade. But now remember the fate of Liverpool after Dalgleish and Man Utd after Fergussen. You may not win the league for another 20 years.
NB. Since we’re talking jobs I am very happy to report that the three month contract my eldest was given by the local metallurgy outfit has just been converted to a full time role!
The resulting levels of parental relief are probably palpable from orbit.
That's great. It's a real worry when they are struggling just to get an 'in'. My son after uni and law conversion could find nothing for almost a year. This was back in 2011. Eventually he got a temp thing at the BoE. It was nothing special, not with graduate trainee status or anything, but it got him going and he's parleyed it up into a good career. Doing very well now.
It is incredibly tough when you’re applying and applying and getting no-where. If you don’t have a personal contact somewhere the flood of AI-driven applications is making recruitment a nightmare for both sides from what I hear.
Yes, contacts are incredibly important and you're less likely to have them when you're young and getting started.
It will come as no surprise that my eldest’s job was obtained because we knew people working at the company. The fact that they have been incredibly positive about him & have converted his three month contract into a full time grad role is down to his own hard work & commitment, but he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to prove himself had we not been able to open that door for him.
If you don’t have contacts then the current job market is incredibly difficult.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
It's worse than people think, private sector workers are now seeing real terms wage contraction. The headline number being reported is only positive because Labour have been giving record pay rises to the state sector which is a transfer of wealth from productive parts of the economy to destructive public sectors.
Worse still over the year 190k fewer Brits are in employment and 770k foreigners have replaced them.
This is the ultimate source of Reform's strength and until this changes expect there to be a substantial number of people willing to give Reform and similar parties a fair hearing.
I think the next government will end up taking pretty drastic action and halt all but the most skilled immigration and end the student visa factories coupled with pretty drastic benefit cuts and eligibility changes for disability benefits. I don't see Reform or a Reform/Tory coalition allowing ADHD or depression for disability benefits.
No one in Britain should get social housing - certainly in places like central London - unless they were born in Britain. Anyone who has it, who isn’t British born, should be given a three year eviction notice
The total value of the subsidy (often monetised by subletting) must be enormous.
How are non-citizens entitled to any government support in the first place?
So, you think we should withdraw all support from Ukrainian refugees in the UK?
No because they’re refugees, temporarily fleeing a brutal war.
IIRC the scheme supports host families giving the refugee a spare room in their house, as opposed to paying their rent in their own house?
Enzo Maresca to take over at Man City from Pep. Bold decision given I seemed to remember Leciester fans were not exactly keen on the style of football he insisted on playing and at Chelsea he hardly set the world alight.
He was deputy manager under Pep, so understands the players and system.
I agree that his style of football was dull, but it was effective and he got us promoted. Chelsea did better under him than subsequent managers.
I think the problems at both clubs were the relationship with higher management and owners at the clubs, amply illustrated by what has gone on since at both clubs. As long as the owners at Man City allow him to choose his own players and style then it should work out. If not then expect storms as he has strongly held views.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
The issue with Linux on the desktop is what I call the showstopper problem. You install Linux, it looks great and works fine for lots of stuff - then you try something that was trivial and Windows and it just won't work no matter what you do.
I've been running Linux on at least one PC for over 20 years, and actually did some kernel development in the early 2000s, but I'm still on Windows for my main desktop precisely because of this.
I switched the PC I use for 3D printing to Linux and had to go back to Windows because Ubuntu couldn't run the Linux version of the slicer software (OrcaSlicer - a modern open-source package). The provided appimage package didn't work at all and building from source errored out.
It was quicker to re-install Windows, download the EXE and it just worked.
I suspect the only area where Linux will actually take a bite out of Windows is gaming, thanks to all the hard work done by Valve on Win32/64 compatibility.
Agree on the last point. There's so many gamers I know who can't wait to get rid of Windows on their gaming PCs.
My impression is that for everything except a few multi-player games where the developer or publisher refuses to flip the “Linux support” switch on their anti-cheat engine (look at you Epic) Linux support in the gaming world is now almost universal thanks to Valve’s efforts.
I have a Steam Deck & I don’t even think about whether a game will work on it these days. I haven’t had anything refuse to run in years. Often there’s a native Linux build that runs in one of Valve‘s Linux runtimes but if not the Windows build works flawlessly in the Windows API layer (Proton / Wine) anyway.
People have been packaging up Valve’s OS for installation onto standard PCs - it’s really a seamless experience that’s better than Windows at this point.
Yeah though Valve are working with anti-cheat companies to integrate them into SteamOS so we may end up getting a solution that publishers are happy with native to SteamOS if Valve can get something worked out.
I was just saying to some of my friends that I'm probably not going to bother with a PS6 and will just get a Steam Deck 2, it's just so much more versatile and I trust Valve a lot more when it comes to a digital library than Sony.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
THERE ARE NO BLOODY JOBS
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
Laour owns this. Much as peole can castigate the Tory government for its ineptitude, they had effectively made youth unemployment a thing of the past. Now it is back with a vengeance - and can be tracked to decisions taken by No. 11.
Hardly surprising if Da Yoof move to the Greens. Or even Reform.
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
It's worse than people think, private sector workers are now seeing real terms wage contraction. The headline number being reported is only positive because Labour have been giving record pay rises to the state sector which is a transfer of wealth from productive parts of the economy to destructive public sectors.
Worse still over the year 190k fewer Brits are in employment and 770k foreigners have replaced them.
This is the ultimate source of Reform's strength and until this changes expect there to be a substantial number of people willing to give Reform and similar parties a fair hearing.
I think the next government will end up taking pretty drastic action and halt all but the most skilled immigration and end the student visa factories coupled with pretty drastic benefit cuts and eligibility changes for disability benefits. I don't see Reform or a Reform/Tory coalition allowing ADHD or depression for disability benefits.
No one in Britain should get social housing - certainly in places like central London - unless they were born in Britain. Anyone who has it, who isn’t British born, should be given a three year eviction notice
The total value of the subsidy (often monetised by subletting) must be enormous.
This focus on devious grifting foreigners cheating native Brits is pure distraction from the real problem. The real problem is an economic model that fosters and tolerates sickening levels of inequality.
We have people in this country who spend more on treats for their dog than somebody on a low wage has to live on. It's a scandal. This is what we are 'mugs' for putting up with.
The populist right, the Trumps and Farages of this world, make out they're on the side of those on the wrong side of the system - but do we see lurid exposees from them of the worst examples of inequality along with tubthumping calls to sort it out? No we don't.
Why? Because the people fronting and running those outfits are ardent supporters of the status quo, in fact would implement policies to push it even further towards the interests of the rich and powerful.
So what they do, what they always do, is try and focus the anger of people who are struggling to get by onto minority groups, many of whom are even less well off. It's a well worn tactic. Well worn for the simple reason that sadly and often it works.
You know you could move out of London if the sight of people spending so much on conspicuous consumption sickens you?
Tiresome comment. I mean, literally, it's got me nodding off.
So what's your theory on why the Right bangs on about immigrants to rile up the working class but has no interest in the sort of economic reforms that might actually direct wealth and opportunity their way?
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
THERE ARE NO BLOODY JOBS
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
No jobs, no houses and huge debt for worthless degrees.
It's really hard to aee how governments over the last 30 years could have screwed over the young any more.
Enzo Maresca to take over at Man City from Pep. Bold decision given I seemed to remember Leciester fans were not exactly keen on the style of football he insisted on playing and at Chelsea he hardly set the world alight.
He was deputy manager under Pep, so understands the players and system.
I agree that his style of football was dull, but it was effective and he got us promoted. Chelsea did better under him than subsequent managers.
I think the problems at both clubs were the relationship with higher management and owners at the clubs, amply illustrated by what has gone on since at both clubs. As long as the owners at Man City allow him to choose his own players and style then it should work out. If not then expect storms as he has strongly held views.
One problem for Man City is everybody else knows the preferred system now, and they have struggled to change in the past season or so to a different approach. It seems like the rebuild is only half done, so interesting that Pep is deciding that is his time to go.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
The issue with Linux on the desktop is what I call the showstopper problem. You install Linux, it looks great and works fine for lots of stuff - then you try something that was trivial and Windows and it just won't work no matter what you do.
I've been running Linux on at least one PC for over 20 years, and actually did some kernel development in the early 2000s, but I'm still on Windows for my main desktop precisely because of this.
I switched the PC I use for 3D printing to Linux and had to go back to Windows because Ubuntu couldn't run the Linux version of the slicer software (OrcaSlicer - a modern open-source package). The provided appimage package didn't work at all and building from source errored out.
It was quicker to re-install Windows, download the EXE and it just worked.
I suspect the only area where Linux will actually take a bite out of Windows is gaming, thanks to all the hard work done by Valve on Win32/64 compatibility.
Which part doesn't work? There's a Flatpak package and that does run at least (I just tried it).
This was about six months ago, the Flatpak wasn't available then. Just an appimage and source. The appimage wouldn’t even open on Ubuntu.
This may be teaching grandmother to suck eggs, but did you mark the AppImage download file as an executable binary? The browser won’t do it, for obvious security related reasons.
Also, are you really sure you downloaded from the official website? See my previous comment...
NB. Since we’re talking jobs I am very happy to report that the three month contract my eldest was given by the local metallurgy outfit has just been converted to a full time role!
The resulting levels of parental relief are probably palpable from orbit.
That's great. It's a real worry when they are struggling just to get an 'in'. My son after uni and law conversion could find nothing for almost a year. This was back in 2011. Eventually he got a temp thing at the BoE. It was nothing special, not with graduate trainee status or anything, but it got him going and he's parleyed it up into a good career. Doing very well now.
It is incredibly tough when you’re applying and applying and getting no-where. If you don’t have a personal contact somewhere the flood of AI-driven applications is making recruitment a nightmare for both sides from what I hear.
Yes, contacts are incredibly important and you're less likely to have them when you're young and getting started.
It will come as no surprise that my eldest’s job was obtained because we knew people working at the company. The fact that they have been incredibly positive about him & have converted his three month contract into a full time grad role is down to his own hard work & commitment, but he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to prove himself had we not been able to open that door for him.
If you don’t have contacts then the current job market is incredibly difficult.
The current job market is quite broken. People looking for jobs and employers looking for good people.
An ocean of bullshit and lies in between - often AI generated.
It seems to have hit entry level jobs the hardest.
NB. Since we’re talking jobs I am very happy to report that the three month contract my eldest was given by the local metallurgy outfit has just been converted to a full time role!
The resulting levels of parental relief are probably palpable from orbit.
That's great. It's a real worry when they are struggling just to get an 'in'. My son after uni and law conversion could find nothing for almost a year. This was back in 2011. Eventually he got a temp thing at the BoE. It was nothing special, not with graduate trainee status or anything, but it got him going and he's parleyed it up into a good career. Doing very well now.
It is incredibly tough when you’re applying and applying and getting no-where. If you don’t have a personal contact somewhere the flood of AI-driven applications is making recruitment a nightmare for both sides from what I hear.
Yes, contacts are incredibly important and you're less likely to have them when you're young and getting started.
It will come as no surprise that my eldest’s job was obtained because we knew people working at the company. The fact that they have been incredibly positive about him & have converted his three month contract into a full time grad role is down to his own hard work & commitment, but he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to prove himself had we not been able to open that door for him.
If you don’t have contacts then the current job market is incredibly difficult.
Ditto my son. He got the heads up on that temp vacancy from a mate who already worked there.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
The issue with Linux on the desktop is what I call the showstopper problem. You install Linux, it looks great and works fine for lots of stuff - then you try something that was trivial and Windows and it just won't work no matter what you do.
I've been running Linux on at least one PC for over 20 years, and actually did some kernel development in the early 2000s, but I'm still on Windows for my main desktop precisely because of this.
I switched the PC I use for 3D printing to Linux and had to go back to Windows because Ubuntu couldn't run the Linux version of the slicer software (OrcaSlicer - a modern open-source package). The provided appimage package didn't work at all and building from source errored out.
It was quicker to re-install Windows, download the EXE and it just worked.
I suspect the only area where Linux will actually take a bite out of Windows is gaming, thanks to all the hard work done by Valve on Win32/64 compatibility.
Which part doesn't work? There's a Flatpak package and that does run at least (I just tried it).
This was about six months ago, the Flatpak wasn't available then. Just an appimage and source. The appimage wouldn’t even open on Ubuntu.
This may be teaching grandmother to suck eggs, but did you mark the AppImage download file as an executable binary? The browser won’t do it, for obvious security related reasons.
Also, are you really sure you downloaded from the official website? See my previous comment...
@ydoethur this conversation above is why you should just get a Mac ;-)
Enzo Maresca to take over at Man City from Pep. Bold decision given I seemed to remember Leciester fans were not exactly keen on the style of football he insisted on playing and at Chelsea he hardly set the world alight.
He was deputy manager under Pep, so understands the players and system.
I agree that his style of football was dull, but it was effective and he got us promoted. Chelsea did better under him than subsequent managers.
I think the problems at both clubs were the relationship with higher management and owners at the clubs, amply illustrated by what has gone on since at both clubs. As long as the owners at Man City allow him to choose his own players and style then it should work out. If not then expect storms as he has strongly held views.
One problem for Man City is everybody else knows the preferred system now, and they have struggled to change in the past season or so to a different approach.
When is that interminable Man City financial rule-breaking case finally going to be settled, do we know?
Btw these are quietly catastrophic unemployment figures. Because the trend feels inexorable
It’s the combo of Labour’s anti-growth, anti-jobs policies, plus new technology, and it is especially hitting the young
My older daughter cannot find a summer job out of uni. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Used to be easy. She’s happy to work for minimum pay doing terrible jobs. Still nothing
Look up catering companies that work the summer event season. They are always looking for temporary staff.
Start with Sodexo and Compass, alongside any local ones you know that do events. Also catering staffing agencies, wedding venues and function rooms always need temp staff for large events.
if she gets her foot in the right door, she could end up spending the summer at Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot, Silverstone…
A summer spent serving canapes to plastered tories. Every young woman's dream.
She spent last summer getting up at 6am to commute across London to Greenwich to clean the toilets at Greenwich University. My older daughter’s work ethic is incredible and I’m very proud of her. No idea where she gets it from: certainly not a lazy chancer like me
So, yeah, she’d be delighted to serve canapés to plastered Tories
Has she tried looking for a summer internship with a company that she'd like to work for? That's what my lad did in the summer after his second year, and he ended up working for the same company after he graduated last year.
Some at least of those internships are unpaid.
My son's internship was paid, but even an unpaid internship is likely to be more useful than menial work experience when it comes to finding suitable employment after graduation. It obviously depends on parental financial support though!
I wouldn't look down on an applicant with menial work experience. It shows self-discipline, commitment and ability to turn up on time, which are useful generic attributes when applying for any job. You just don't want to spend too long doing them.
I spent the summer of 1983 working as a chef in a Wimpy Bar, and learnt a lot about work and workplace relations. It was a strange inverted society with the summer staff being university students and the bosses and permenant staff all having left school at 16. It levelled the playing field nicely and we all piled down the pub together after work.
Not least of the lessons was the importance of studying hard so as not to be stuck there permenantly.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't look down on anyone with menial work experience - God knows I did enough of it when I was a student! It's certainly better than spending the summer lazing around. But I think that experience in an area relevant to the field that you want to work in is probably of more value to an employer.
THERE ARE NO BLOODY JOBS
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
Laour owns this. Much as peole can castigate the Tory government for its ineptitude, they had effectively made youth unemployment a thing of the past. Now it is back with a vengeance - and can be tracked to decisions taken by No. 11.
Hardly surprising if Da Yoof move to the Greens. Or even Reform.
Though Kemi has made a big of progress with the youth after her scrap Stamp Duty pledge. The only age group the Conservatives have increased their voteshare in since 2024 is 18 to 35s
Morning all. Off thread but I'm feeling distinctly irritable. My daughter has her English Literature GCSE today and she's been rattling through it. Apparently English Literature is essentially a GCSE in woke: you have to split society up into bits and say who the goodies are (ethnic minorities and to a lesser extent the working classes) and who the baddies are (the patriarchy, white people, the bourgeoisie, the British.) This is a compulsory GCSE nowadays. Because some writer of fiction said so. How the fuck did we get here? I'm sure no other countries practice self-hatred to quite this degree.
What novels is she studying ?
We did 1984 and also Twelfth Night.
An Inspector Calls - it's all 'this shows the patriarchy, that shows the contempt for the upper classes of the working classes, this shows the need for socialism' - the study approach appears to be authored by the Momentum Group. The racism bit is Noughts and Crosses which has come up in her revision guides but she is not actually doing. Also war poems.
To be fair she is also doing MacBeth which does not fit into that category.
I never did it - I don't think it was compulsory in the 90s. I did English Language (which involved reading a book) but not English Literature. I never did any Shakespeare (not that I object to Shakespeare on principle - but like much of English Literature it seems at best to fall into the category of 'odd thing to make a compulsory aspect of 11-16 schooling').
It is compulsory to do one form of English, in the sense that if you don't pass either Lang or Lit you have to resit it. That's all. Most schools however insist on two due to league tables particularly for brighter pupils (which from what you've said I assume your daughter is).
I am doubly irritable because as a subject it is causing her more stress than all the other subjects combined, much to the bafflement of my wife who thinks Eng Lit is the easiest subject. My daughter has inherited my preferences for subjects in which there are right and wrong answers!
Hah, same, it’s the reason I did Maths/Further Maths, Physics, and History at A-Level.
Right and wrong answers in History?
There are historical facts which cannot be disputed, eg The French won a decisive victory over the Spanish at Tudela on 23rd November 1808, or the Red Army won the Battle of Berlin, on 2nd May 1945, or Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust.
But, there are also plenty of colourable hypotheses. For example, the Browning/Goldhagen debate of the 1990's. Goldhagen argued that Germany was, as a nation, uniquely prone to murderous anti-semitism. Browning argued that Reserve Police Battalion 101, which shot and rounded up tens of thousands of Jews was comprised of "ordinary men", absolutely unremarkable people; men who were, in no way, pathological, or unusually bigoted. The implication of that argument is that mass murder of a hated group is something that could be perpetrated in almost any society.
To my mind, Browning got the better of that debate, but one could still reasonably argue to the contrary.
Browning was right.
Look at Britain in the last few years.
An online friend of mine grew up with a very kind neighbour who had served in Vietnam. She once commented on the bits of dried apple he had hanging around a picture in the hallway. It turned out, they were actually dried ears, belonging to someone called "Charlie".
Enzo Maresca to take over at Man City from Pep. Bold decision given I seemed to remember Leciester fans were not exactly keen on the style of football he insisted on playing and at Chelsea he hardly set the world alight.
He was deputy manager under Pep, so understands the players and system.
I agree that his style of football was dull, but it was effective and he got us promoted. Chelsea did better under him than subsequent managers.
I think the problems at both clubs were the relationship with higher management and owners at the clubs, amply illustrated by what has gone on since at both clubs. As long as the owners at Man City allow him to choose his own players and style then it should work out. If not then expect storms as he has strongly held views.
One problem for Man City is everybody else knows the preferred system now, and they have struggled to change in the past season or so to a different approach.
Yes, and I agree and that is Enzo in a nutshell.
Even in the Championship other teams sussed out the system and stifled it. Hence the drop off in results towards the end of our season. It is a robotic system that doesn't really allow for flair so is pretty tedious to watch.
There’s no question that Linux requires a tad more handholding to this day, but the way Microsoft has fouled up Windows makes that less of a downside than it used to be. Everyone used to assume that the infamous “year of the Linux desktop” would require Linux to improve beyond all recognition to make the switch a no brainer. Instead Microsoft decided to stab themselves in the front and make such a mess of Windows that people are voluntarily switching to Linux despite the flaws.
The issue with Linux on the desktop is what I call the showstopper problem. You install Linux, it looks great and works fine for lots of stuff - then you try something that was trivial and Windows and it just won't work no matter what you do.
I've been running Linux on at least one PC for over 20 years, and actually did some kernel development in the early 2000s, but I'm still on Windows for my main desktop precisely because of this.
I switched the PC I use for 3D printing to Linux and had to go back to Windows because Ubuntu couldn't run the Linux version of the slicer software (OrcaSlicer - a modern open-source package). The provided appimage package didn't work at all and building from source errored out.
It was quicker to re-install Windows, download the EXE and it just worked.
I suspect the only area where Linux will actually take a bite out of Windows is gaming, thanks to all the hard work done by Valve on Win32/64 compatibility.
Which part doesn't work? There's a Flatpak package and that does run at least (I just tried it).
This was about six months ago, the Flatpak wasn't available then. Just an appimage and source. The appimage wouldn’t even open on Ubuntu.
This may be teaching grandmother to suck eggs, but did you mark the AppImage download file as an executable binary? The browser won’t do it, for obvious security related reasons.
Also, are you really sure you downloaded from the official website? See my previous comment...
@ydoethur this conversation above is why you should just get a Mac ;-)
One the one hand, yes. On the other hand the official Orca Slicer website does tell you not to use this installation method at all & to use one of their supported sources for the software on Linux!
Not sure why they offer AppImages if they don’t want to support them to be honest. You always have to remember to make the things executable & I always forget because I almost never use them. I think the only AppImage I currently use comes from HMRC.
Comments
Latest YouGov Westminster voting intention, 17-18 May 2026
Reform UK: 25% (-3 from 10-11 May)
Conservatives: 18% (+1)
Labour: 17% (+1)
Greens: 15% (-1)
Lib Dems: 14% (+1)
Restore Britain: 4% (+1)
SNP: 3% (=)
Plaid Cymru: 1% (-1)
Your Party: 0% (=)
Can he fire saints to the Premier league?
So I guess I was proved wrong. It is perhaps better to study 3 A-levels and use the rest of your time to do something you are passionate about then to study additional A-levels.
Equally HS2 would be centered around Birmingham - with all other routes starting / ending there
Edit the speed partly came from if we do it in x minutes we can get away with 4 platforms rather than 8.
But it does seem to become the case that universities really don't care beyond the 3, unless I think Further Maths if you want to do a Maths degree.
But yes, YouGov's panel does depend on online members.
Worse still over the year 190k fewer Brits are in employment and 770k foreigners have replaced them.
This is the ultimate source of Reform's strength and until this changes expect there to be a substantial number of people willing to give Reform and similar parties a fair hearing.
I think the next government will end up taking pretty drastic action and halt all but the most skilled immigration and end the student visa factories coupled with pretty drastic benefit cuts and eligibility changes for disability benefits. I don't see Reform or a Reform/Tory coalition allowing ADHD or depression for disability benefits.
Eldest got enough points to get her into Melbourne Uni; the next is just finishing the exams and aiming for Sydney. England/Wales, they feel is too expensive.
I hate that the word has been misused in this way, but it is - literally - a lost cause.
Do boomers not realise this? The jobs market for young people - perhaps especially graduates - is turning into a disaster zone. And it’s going to get worse. With help from our insane government
I and many others, no doubt including yourself, were misled by Starmer thinking that he would uphold the highest of standards and be in the forefront of change
And yet within weeks, we learned he was having his clothes, glasses, football tickets and other freebies bought and given to him, then it went on to the catastrophic WFA error (similar to the Poll tax error) followed by 16 plus u turns, allowed his chancellor to produce a job destroying budget, and the mother of all the mistakes in thinking it would be good to have Mandelson as our US Ambassador and failing to accept responsibility by firing almost anyone or everyone associated with it and thought that he could survive this act of utter hypocrisy, not least with his demands that Johnson resigns
Labour's civil war is ultimately Starmer's responsibility and he needs to accept his role and resign leaving office in as dignified way possible
Anyway, on the 'alcohol day' were were 'sort of' encouraged to bring in some orange juice and drink the surplus!
There wasn't a lot, of course.
I've been running Linux on at least one PC for over 20 years, and actually did some kernel development in the early 2000s, but I'm still on Windows for my main desktop precisely because of this.
I switched the PC I use for 3D printing to Linux and had to go back to Windows because Ubuntu couldn't run the Linux version of the slicer software (OrcaSlicer - a modern open-source package). The provided appimage package didn't work at all and building from source errored out.
It was quicker to re-install Windows, download the EXE and it just worked.
I suspect the only area where Linux will actually take a bite out of Windows is gaming, thanks to all the hard work done by Valve on Win32/64 compatibility.
If you stuck a made-up party with a funky name in the poll ("Renew Britain"), would it get 4%?
I once got a job a bit like that. They had won a new contract and hadn't yet really got around to planning out new staffing etc and were like ok, why not, come and code out all this stuff so we can then starting automating more of our testing will be really useful in a few months time.
But, there are also plenty of colourable hypotheses. For example, the Browning/Goldhagen debate of the 1990's. Goldhagen argued that Germany was, as a nation, uniquely prone to murderous anti-semitism. Browning argued that Reserve Police Battalion 101, which shot and rounded up tens of thousands of Jews was comprised of "ordinary men", absolutely unremarkable people; men who were, in no way, pathological, or unusually bigoted. The implication of that argument is that mass murder of a hated group is something that could be perpetrated in almost any society.
To my mind, Browning got the better of that debate, but one could still reasonably argue to the contrary.
https://x.com/i/status/2056684776010948959
The people to find say in tech are people like the head of R&D, 1 or 2 steps below the CTO. They are the people tasked with actually getting the shit done and know where they are at with ongoing projects. And then you want a polite open email to them and if you have done some project that is relevant / really interesting, send a link to project page.
We have people in this country who spend more on treats for their dog than somebody on a low wage has to live on. It's a scandal. This is what we are 'mugs' for putting up with.
The populist right, the Trumps and Farages of this world, make out they're on the side of those on the wrong side of the system - but do we see lurid exposees from them of the worst examples of inequality along with tubthumping calls to sort it out? No we don't.
Why? Because the people fronting and running those outfits are ardent supporters of the status quo, in fact would implement policies to push it even further towards the interests of the rich and powerful.
So what they do, what they always do, is try and focus the anger of people who are struggling to get by onto minority groups, many of whom are even less well off. It's a well worn tactic. Well worn for the simple reason that sadly and often it works.
Labour lost a lot of seats in the north because the Greens split the vote .
Look at Britain in the last few years.
The Github repo also doesn’t point to the top result, which is a bad look.
It’s symptomatic of the state of the current web that Google apparently can’t distinguish between these websites, some of which look incredibly scammy. I wouldn’t trust them at all, but I bet a lot of users just click on one of these results without realising that the Orca Slicer devs have nothing to do with them.
Streeting meanwhile looks like a Labour Heseltine or Sunak, their assassin of the leadership of a PM unpopular in the polls but who did not get the crown in the subsequent leadership election. Streeting may take some comfort though from the fact Rishi ultimately got the PM gig after the darling of the Tory membership in 2022, Liz Truss, pursued an economic policy that crashed the markets. Hence Burnham aides already briefing he will be more cautious than she was
I have a Steam Deck & I don’t even think about whether a game will work on it these days. I haven’t had anything refuse to run in years. Often there’s a native Linux build that runs in one of Valve‘s Linux runtimes but if not the Windows build works flawlessly in the Windows API layer (Proton / Wine) anyway.
People have been packaging up Valve’s OS for installation onto standard PCs - it’s really a seamless experience that’s better than Windows at this point.
Will any council control depend upon those outcomes do we know?
Peter.
I was just saying to some of my friends that I'm probably not going to bother with a PS6 and will just get a Steam Deck 2, it's just so much more versatile and I trust Valve a lot more when it comes to a digital library than Sony.
I wonder if Pep will have timed his departure perfectly. There must come a time soon at which City get a 100 point deduction for their various infringements...
If you don’t have contacts then the current job market is incredibly difficult.
IIRC the scheme supports host families giving the refugee a spare room in their house, as opposed to paying their rent in their own house?
I agree that his style of football was dull, but it was effective and he got us promoted. Chelsea did better under him than subsequent managers.
I think the problems at both clubs were the relationship with higher management and owners at the clubs, amply illustrated by what has gone on since at both clubs. As long as the owners at Man City allow him to choose his own players and style then it should work out. If not then expect storms as he has strongly held views.
https://x.com/MartinSLewis/status/2056681961557561813?s=20
Hardly surprising if Da Yoof move to the Greens. Or even Reform.
So what's your theory on why the Right bangs on about immigrants to rile up the working class but has no interest in the sort of economic reforms that might actually direct wealth and opportunity their way?
It's really hard to aee how governments over the last 30 years could have screwed over the young any more.
Also, are you really sure you downloaded from the official website? See my previous comment...
An ocean of bullshit and lies in between - often AI generated.
It seems to have hit entry level jobs the hardest.
Even in the Championship other teams sussed out the system and stifled it. Hence the drop off in results towards the end of our season. It is a robotic system that doesn't really allow for flair so is pretty tedious to watch.
Not sure why they offer AppImages if they don’t want to support them to be honest. You always have to remember to make the things executable & I always forget because I almost never use them. I think the only AppImage I currently use comes from HMRC.