Andrew

https://mastodon.social/@serendip1959

Civil Engineer Humanist Rheumatoid Arthritis and Type 2 Diabetes Believes in a fairer society Loves Archery

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Last Notes

2025-02-28 20:04:12 UTC

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stage managed for the US media to force Zelenskyy to beg for help. Trump and Vance talked over him, didn’t let him speak and generally trashed him and Ukraine.
Putin has a smile on his face.

2024-12-19 21:55:01 UTC

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we should ask why foreign investment can do well here but not UK investment? The risk averse, quick profit, asset stripping City is one reason.

2024-12-17 20:36:26 UTC

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its a Conservative knee jerk. People can’t be trusted to work from home they think. If you don’t trust me I don’t trust or respect you. Bye….

2024-12-07 12:42:01 UTC

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Pensioners decrying those who claim benefits while ignoring that the state pension itself is a benefit. Cheating the taxman is a game, cheating the benefits system a crime. Immigrants and benefit claimants are what is wrong with the economy, not billionaires and tax havens. The hypocrisy goes on and on.
The Torygraph leads the charge, aided and abetted by the usual suspects. Remind me who owns them…..?

2024-11-12 18:17:36 UTC

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Not “enemies of the people” then?

2024-11-10 09:38:11 UTC

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Back in the 60s we looked at European social housing as a model for slum clearance and the building of tower blocks. We copied system building but did it badly and cheaply. Those high ideals are now sink estates.
Something needs to change in the UK psyche with regards to social housing, just copying the European approach doesn’t work, we need to copy their ethos as well.

2024-11-05 16:28:38 UTC

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It should have been in the interest of suppliers to invest in storage to stock up on gas when cost lower as a hedge. That required investment, easier to increase bills.
The impasse with Centrica over subsidies to reopen the Rough storage field perhaps shows the real problem, Government allergy to subsidies and a failure by Government to effectively intervene in the national interest even when the market is failing.
https://www.ft.com/content/0ebf0cf1-af77-4670-90d6-ec060fd94f66

2024-11-02 17:03:41 UTC

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There seems to have been a conscious decision by the government to separate those directly employed by the public sector from those who provide services under contract to the public sector but are otherwise private businesses. This includes most GPs, pharmacists and care homes.
However, the collapse of these essential services cannot be allowed to happen.

2024-11-02 09:13:14 UTC

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Largely flunking A levels due to circumstances at home I studied on day release for 2 years and did well enough to get onto a degree course at a polytechnic. This was a so called sandwich degree.
Although from a middle class home I had no support from my parents either financially or even to do the degree at all. It was to spite my father that I grafted to graduate with a 1st class honours in civil engineering.
Had I needed a loan I wouldn’t have gone.

2024-11-02 08:49:02 UTC

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So we have the interesting conundrum of “free” tertiary education being introduced by a Conservative government in 1962 and being ended by a Labour government.

2024-11-02 08:47:53 UTC

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Back in the day there was a view that public finance of tertiary education was justified as it benefited society. That IMO is still the case.
However, a contrary view was that the public were financing a minority mainly middle and upper class to have a party for 3 years at their expense.
The ending of it in 1998 was directly related to the Blair ambition to increase participation to 50% and the cost of doing so if it all fell on the public purse.

2024-11-02 08:15:34 UTC

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we could also conclude that having a degree is no longer the door opener it used to be. Employers in response to increased supply of graduates starting requiring Masters or use processes to identify the best candidates.
Arguably graduate pay has been pulled down by a disparity between the number of graduates and the number of jobs that are truly graduate only opportunities.
50 % of US graduates are doing jobs that don’t require a degree.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/college-grads-jobs-underemployed/

2024-11-01 08:52:54 UTC

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There is an old joke about a King looking nervously at a mob of people with torches and pitchforks wanting his head. He is told that all he needs to do to survive is to tell the pitchfork people that the torch people want their pitchforks….
In a nutshell that is what the right wing media does. The story matters not if it can’t be heard.

2024-10-31 09:58:29 UTC

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No I hadn’t seen it. It captures the key point that taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society which was the bargain most people were happy with until Thatcher and Reagan.
Libertarian viewpoints seem to be more dominant now that one persons money should not be redistributed by tax to another no matter how dire the need.

2024-10-31 08:20:18 UTC

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After 32 years of slash and burn it might take a bit longer….. I have given Blair/Brown a free pass, but the “Iron Chancellor” didn’t significantly change the fiscal policies he inherited, just loosened them.
However, at the next election it will be “do you want to pay less tax” and the electorate egged on by the usual suspects will respond yes.
How do we change the question to “do you want good public services”?

2024-10-31 08:12:11 UTC

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part of the historic UK low productivity problem is too many people in low value low paid jobs. We are addicted to low pay.
With tax levels higher in the EU then by this measure it should be an economic wasteland, it is not.
As ever the UK is in it for quick easy profit, short termism rules.

2024-10-30 09:26:15 UTC

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The voters who like to think we are 20 miles off the coast of Maine?
The voters who won’t have anything to do with people who don’t speak English and eat funny food?
The voters who yearn for the days of pith helmets and the Union Flag flying in the sun and who don’t realise the world changed forever in 1945?
We are doomed….

2024-10-30 08:13:37 UTC

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Second hand car dealers and the finance sector, what could go wrong?
Yes I know that finance is for new cars as well…
With the end of PPI claims the industry that was built around it was always going to look for new opportunities. A win for consumers, or a win for the PPI claim sharks?
Have to go my phone is ringing……

2024-10-30 08:01:04 UTC

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Is the real reason for the “mid Atlantic model” the pendulum swing between Tories who row towards America and Labour who row towards Europe with neither making it before they get voted out?
We also need a European political model perhaps?

2024-10-26 14:03:59 UTC

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This article may help.
The NHS has significantly less managers than equivalent size organisations and cuts have fallen on managers rather than clinical staff.
https://www.nhsconfed.org/long-reads/nhs-overmanaged#:~:text=Key%20points%201%20NHS%20managers%20make%20up%20circa,continue%20to%20claim%20that%20the%20NHS%20is%20overmanaged.

2024-10-26 12:02:25 UTC

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the film presented a plausible if improbable pathway for AI where the machine created by humans and given “intelligence” decides humans are the problem.
The real issue is not the film it is the media citing it in explorations of the future of AI.
We may never see a T1000 but AI is going to change our future. For good or bad is in our hands.

2024-10-26 07:21:44 UTC

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the groundwork has been laid so that if he loses narrowly the election will be challenged and he still wins. Harris has to win convincingly, and it is not clear she will.
Anyone who thinks a Trump presidency is a concern only for the US is a fool.

2024-10-23 20:54:25 UTC

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A paradigm shift is needed in transport esp in cities. We have been beating about the bush for years, and the debate keeps coming back to road charging, but it is politically fraught.
The fall in fuel duty revenue will force a change and groups like the RAC are coming round, but we also need a step change in public transport.

2024-10-23 15:42:45 UTC

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that’s me right now…

2024-10-22 20:34:42 UTC

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the myth is that the NHS is a financial black hole when the reality is we spend per capita both public and private a bit more than the OECD average. This means that most major western economies spend more. A little known fact is that the Govt caps doctor and nurse training places on threat of fines for Universities awarding more.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/352/973/986/508/773/original/ad2a02e522dcf29b.png

2024-10-22 17:50:42 UTC

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Lack of social care leads to bed blocking in hospitals where patients well enough to be discharged cannot be due to lack of capacity in the social care system to do assessments and provide support.
I have first hand experience of some of the consequences having recently spent 36 hours in A+E waiting for admission, with corridors lined with beds. 14 hours of that sitting on a chair.

2024-10-22 17:23:16 UTC

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They sold off the council houses, while preventing the proceeds from being used to build more, to gerrymander future elections on the basis that homeowners were thought more likely to vote Conservative. They wanted to expand the middle classes while reducing the working class.

2024-10-22 15:25:41 UTC

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A prime goal of privatisation was to shift the burden of investment and risk from the public purse and taxes, to the private sector to be paid for directly by consumers. Tax cuts could follow funded by the windfall.

2024-10-22 06:47:49 UTC

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Under the previous Government he would have been deported to Rwanda as an undocumented migrant and his marmalade sandwiches disposed of as a health hazard.
The Queen found time to have tea with him.
However, I hope the law is not too distracted by an apparent case of illegal issue of official documents to a non-existent, indeed non-human, personage.

2024-10-21 18:09:37 UTC

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Ahem…. I had a vinyl collection which became a CD collection which became a digital collection…. The hardware didn’t survive wife and children 😠😠 and an iPod revived my interest in music.
I miss the vinyl, the feel, the pleasure of stylus in groove etc but am also happy with digital. I still dream of a top end vinyl system…one day.

2024-10-20 18:03:53 UTC

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a lot of brave American men died to remove the scourge of that flag from the world. Why doesn’t its reappearance cause more outrage in the US?

2024-10-06 07:20:13 UTC

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because the ECHR is in the way of an assault on rights across the board. We have an ill defined constitution that mainly depends on court opinion to work and the courts lean on the ECHR.
Kemi Badenoch made it clear when she opposed maternity pay before back tracking, this and other benefits are the target. They want a low benefits, low rights, hire and fire economy where people are cowed into working for a pittance from fear of losing their job.

2024-10-02 16:22:38 UTC

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There was an unhinged guy with a fondness for uniforms in the 1930s who could be incoherent in pouring out hateful bile in rambling speeches that were received rapturously by the faithful. Most cult leaders display Svengali tendencies in getting the faithful to follow them despite manifest personal failings.
In the closing years of WW2 Hitler had passed into manifest madness but still had people falling at his feet.
It’s the cult not the leader that is dangerous.

2024-09-19 07:08:22 UTC

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Yet it would be 1928 before British women at home would get the same rights.

2024-09-12 17:32:08 UTC

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And the benefit to science, engineering and life on earth from this when examined under an electron microscope was zero, zilch, nothing.

2024-09-07 13:55:01 UTC

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after Apollo 1, Columbia and Challenger NASA couldn’t risk their astronauts dying in another defective spacecraft while managers kept their fingers crossed.

2024-08-27 20:00:07 UTC

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Why do we keep turning left?

2024-08-11 13:26:10 UTC

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Part of erasing Gaza from history and a wider narrative that there is no such thing as Palestine.