Brexit, for once some facts.

[oldgroaner]

After all that's been said about leaving,a big success will be if all the predictions of doom don't come true.

It may please you, but it won't please the public, too many promises of a "Golden Age" have been made. And it won't be enough in the long run, Brexit is certainly doomed.
As I said before, there will be no economic disaster, but simply avoiding that merely puts us where there was a protest vote against the Government that was Brexit.
The public won't be so easily conned a third time.
It’s not the usual case of a government changing and the public accepting the change placidly, at least half of the population is opposed to the change, and many of the new Tory supporters have great expectations, Which by have little chance of being satisfied.Even in the unlikely event that Boris intended that they would be.
Which means that the opposition will grow and there will be trouble exactly as we predicted, and the danger is that someone like Farage will tap into the unrest to create problems.
The leave voters were angry because they thought they’d been robbed of their precious victory in the referendum, so why should the remain voters be happy at being robbed what they see as the bright future for the country?
To sum up you have half the Population imagining they have won something and the other half of the population knowing they’ve been robbed of something, not a good place to start a new government is it with the population divided down the middle with irreconcilable views.

 

[flecc]

If you cannot write or read and are male ,then the position is as I have stated.

You stated only fruit or potato picking, so it is not as you stated.

As I showed the range of jobs open to virtually all and needing little or no literacy is vast and always will be.

I don't know what imaginary world you live in, but in my UK world the number who cannot read or write at all is miniscule.
.

 

[Danidl]

You stated only fruit or potato picking, so it is not as you stated.

As I showed the range of jobs open to virtually all and needing little or no literacy is vast and always will be.

I don't know what imaginary world you live in, but in my UK world the number who cannot read or write at all is miniscule.
.

Regrettably I live in a world in which this is real. Fortunately not in my family, but in my professional life I have encountered it. This extended riff started off when I suggested that in our youth, those people with extremely poor literacy were able to get on better and were at less disadvantage than those of today . It was possible to hide this lack then but not now.. The reason being that .. . There were more unskilled jobs , and even skilled jobs which did not require literacy or numeracy. Within the Engineering Trades, the wet trades did not require this literacy , whereas carpentry, joinery and electrical did. Plumbing has now become one in which mathematical competence is of growing importance.
But now You cannot even use a telephone directory and looking up the shape of a name and phone number without the ability to use the alphabet
Now we have spent enough time on this, and for some reason you are taking it personally , so having explained my position, and not seeking to score points ,I withdraw.

 

[50Hertz]

Regrettably I live in a world in which this is real. Fortunately not in my family, but in my professional life I have encountered it. This extended riff started off when I suggested that in our youth, those people with extremely poor literacy were able to get on better and were at less disadvantage than those of today . It was possible to hide this lack then but not now.. The reason being that .. . There were more unskilled jobs , and even skilled jobs which did not require literacy or numeracy. Within the Engineering Trades, the wet trades did not require this literacy , whereas carpentry, joinery and electrical did. Plumbing has now become one in which mathematical competence is of growing importance.
But now You cannot even use a telephone directory and looking up the shape of a name and phone number without the ability to use the alphabet
Now we have spent enough time on this, and for some reason you are taking it personally , so having explained my position, and not seeking to score points ,I withdraw.

I‘ve tried to do a filtering job on the above to establish what you are saying. I think it’s the following:

You don’t need to be smart to shovel $h!t. There were a lot of $h!t shovelling jobs in olden days, not so today. If you ain’t smart, there are less places you can go to shovel $h!t these days.

I think you are wrong, folks always gonna need their $h!t shovellin’.

 

[Danidl]

I‘ve tried to do a filtering job on the above to establish what you are saying. I think it’s the following:

You don’t need to be smart to shovel $h!t. There were a lot of $h!t shovelling jobs in olden days, not so today. If you ain’t smart, there are less places you can go to shovel $h!t these days.

I think you are wrong, folks always gonna need their $h!t shovellin’.

More ot less ok, except that even for that job, you also need to pass an written entrance test. Because in your own inimitable fashion, you have described the job function of a care assistant.
The other point is I was not ever saying that illiterate people are not smart.

 

[oldgroaner]

Christmas Day Humour in the Telegraph
"
Emily Thornberry admits Labour promised 'moon and stars' in its Corbyn-controlled manifesto

Whereas the Conservatives only promised that their Tiger would lose its stripes and become a pussy cat.
And in the Express
"
Boris hails ‘selfless’ NHS, military and police sacrificing Christmas to help others
BORIS JOHNSON wished the United Kingdom a happy Christmas while paying tribute to the Britons who have sacrificed their Christmas to help others.

Nice bit of self promotion from a man who's "Christmas Sacrifice" is bonking on a tropical island!

 

[oyster]

Looks like even the pope is thinking about our PM:

Pope: God loves even those who make 'a complete mess of things'

 

[Zlatan]

Merry Christmas OG.
At least whilst you are having a go at BJ you are leaving me, 50,Fingers,OJ, leave voters, the UK, the Royal Family, Tories in general, Corbyn, Trump, America, and a few others alone.
You can always find silver lining if you look hard enough.

 

[Danidl]

There is an interesting aside in the Express website claiming that both Spain and Poland are planning EUExits..
The situation in Poland is diametrically opposite to their headline. The fact being that Judges on the Polish Supreme Court are WARNing their own Government ,that proposed "reforms" will put Poland on a collision course with EU Directives ..so that the Government will desist. It is about maintaining the independence of the judicature
The situation in Spain is that a small political party VOX ..touted as the third largest .but only 15% of the Congress and 0.5% of the Senate,have objected to a ECJ ruling which accepts a Catalan MEP as a legitimate representative,and which requests the Spanish authorities to allow him attend the European Parliament. This has all the echos of the Bobby Sands saga and Westminster.

 

[oldgroaner]

Merry Christmas OG.
At least whilst you are having a go at BJ you are leaving me, 50,Fingers,OJ, leave voters, the UK, the Royal Family, Tories in general, Corbyn, Trump, America, and a few others alone.
You can always find silver lining if you look hard enough.

Not in my situation and that has nothing to do with Brexit

 

[50Hertz]

Christmas Day Humour in the Telegraph
"
Emily Thornberry admits Labour promised 'moon and stars' in its Corbyn-controlled manifesto

Whereas the Conservatives only promised that their Tiger would lose its stripes and become a pussy cat.
And in the Express
"
Boris hails ‘selfless’ NHS, military and police sacrificing Christmas to help others
BORIS JOHNSON wished the United Kingdom a happy Christmas while paying tribute to the Britons who have sacrificed their Christmas to help others.

Nice bit of self promotion from a man who's "Christmas Sacrifice" is bonking on a tropical island!

I had a look at the roster earlier, and I can give you annual leave if you’d like to take the day off. I’ve also had a word with fingers and he will cover if anything urgent comes in.

Hope you have a peaceful Christmas Day.

 

[Kenny]

Happy Christmas to all the regular contributors to this thread.
I look in every day and have learned a lot and been amused a lot!

Being a Scottish Nationalist and pro remain, I do worry for the future though.

 

[flecc]

But now You cannot even use a telephone directory and looking up the shape of a name and phone number without the ability to use the alphabet

I'm not taking it personally Danidl, I'm just trying to show you how hopelessly wrong you are on this subject. Read on and you'll discover that there are far more unskilled jobs now than at any other time since WW2.

I use to have a lot of respect for you, but now you are rapidly losing it. How many times must I say that we effectively have 100% literacy in this country, yet still you come back with the need to know the alphabet. How the on earth do you think all these people are texting on their smartphones?

This extended riff started off when I suggested that in our youth, those people with extremely poor literacy were able to get on better and were at less disadvantage than those of today . It was possible to hide this lack then but not now.. The reason being that .. . There were more unskilled jobs , and even skilled jobs which did not require literacy or numeracy.

This is completely untrue, there has been a huge expansion of unskilled menial jobs since our youth. When I was young large numbers were employed in manufacturing doing skilled or semi skilled jobs, but most of those jobs have disappeared and we've grown a service economy instead, as witness the huge increase in the number of office blocks in our towns and cities.

All those offices have occasioned huge growth in the number of cleaners, door, security and mailroom staff, all unskilled jobs. And here again you've shown your quaintly old fashioned view by saying cleaning is mostly done by women. It isn't, for decades office cleaning is overwhelmingly done by men. Even the youngsters I mentioned are all male. The reason is simple, office cleaning is done after business hours in the evening and overnight when many women need to be caring for their children.

Which brings me to the next area of huge expansion of unskilled jobs where women indeed do much of the work. That area is tourism which we've hugely expanded as an earner in place of lost manufacturing. That's brought a large increase in the hospitality industry, hotels etc, and thousands of jobs like chambermaid maintaining hotel rooms within school hours, so ideally suiting women. I need hardly list all the other unskilled jobs associated with tourism.

Having shown those two areas of huge increase in menial work since our youth, I turn to a third huge area which didn't exist at all when we were young, recycling.

All over the country local authorities have recycling depots where we take ours to, and as we all know each has a number of staff in completely new unskilled jobs. The skipfulls of material then go on to dedicated recycling companies, where once again they employ large numbers of unskilled sorting and grading workers. Some automation has proved possible in those companies, but they still have to resort to manual stages of final sorting.

Which brings me onto another completely new area of manual work, the waste to power stations which are springing up now. We have a large one of these here where large numbers of unskilled workers are employed sorting and extracting unsuitable materials from the refuse on a long conveyer belt heading for the furnace.

No, I'm not finished yet, not by far. Take cars, when we were young the roads were virtually empty, but now they are clogged with around 30 million cars, all getting dirty. The automatic washing machines haven't found favour with many motorists so manual handwash stations have sprung up. They are everywhere, at garages, in car parks, random sites etc, employing countless thousands of unskilled workers.

Then there's the supermarkets that didn't exist when we were young but now are everywhere and dominate the retail sector. They overwhelmingly employ unskilled labour, warehousing, unloading, shelf stacking, checkouts, hundreds of thousands of completely new unskilled jobs that didn't exist when we were served in individual shops by people with skills in their supply area.

But of course we buy much online, supplied by the likes of Amazon from warehouses full of unskilled or semiskilled staff doing jobs that never use to exist.

And to deliver those goods we have a huge number of courier companies with many thousands of loading and driving jobs that didn't used to exist.

Then of course another vast new area of employment for the unskilled is fast food, which didn't exist when we were young but is now a massive national industry.

And how about minicabs in their countless thousands. When we were young and everyone much poorer, few could use taxis. But now almost everyone uses minicabs, creating a vast number of new unskilled jobs.

I could go on listing more, but I've shown that the number of new unskilled jobs overwhelmingly surpasses the small number lost to technology and qualifications that you've been able to give as examples

And far from there being a shortage of unskilled jobs, the vast increase in them has necessitated importing many hundreds of thousands of immigrants to fill the vacancies. That's not just in crop picking, it's in all of the areas I've listed.

The mistake you and many have made is in believing what the politicians say and the media and academia exaggerates. For years they've all propagated the lie that everyone has to be much better educated to be able to get a job at all, but they've always been wrong as I've showed above.

We've had Harold Wilson with his "white heat of technology", telling us we'd all be in an age of leisure by the millenium, with little need to work. In fact by the millennium we were telling the EU we couldn't manage with their 35 hour week and needed 48 hours. So much for the age of leisure.

We've had the idiot Blair with his "education, education, education" message, leading to half our young pointlessly going to university and getting degrees, only to find the only jobs for most of them are the unskilled ones I've listed.

And of course academia has a vested interest in promoting their false message.

So please ignore their message, just look at the facts. Since WW2 there's never been more unskilled employment than there is now. The range of unskilled jobs now available is immense.
.

 

[Danidl]

I'm not taking it personally Danidl, I'm just trying to show you how hopelessly wrong you are on this subject. Read on and you'll discover that there are far more unskilled jobs now than at any other time since WW2.

I use to have a lot of respect for you, but now you are rapidly losing it. How many times must I say that we effectively have 100% literacy in this country, yet still you come back with the need to know the alphabet. How the on earth do you think all these people are texting on their smartphones?



This is completely untrue, there has been a huge expansion of unskilled menial jobs since our youth. When I was young large numbers were employed in manufacturing doing skilled or semi skilled jobs, but most of those jobs have disappeared and we've grown a service economy instead, as witness the huge increase in the number of office blocks in our towns and cities.

All those offices have occasioned huge growth in the number of cleaners, door, security and mailroom staff, all unskilled jobs. And here again you've shown your quaintly old fashioned view by saying cleaning is mostly done by women. It isn't, for decades office cleaning is overwhelmingly done by men. Even the youngsters I mentioned are all male. The reason is simple, office cleaning is done after business hours in the evening and overnight when many women need to be caring for their children.

Which brings me to the next area of huge expansion of unskilled jobs where women indeed do much of the work. That area is tourism which we've hugely expanded as an earner in place of lost manufacturing. That's brought a large increase in the hospitality industry, hotels etc, and thousands of jobs like chambermaid maintaining hotel rooms within school hours, so ideally suiting women. I need hardly list all the other unskilled jobs associated with tourism.

Having shown those two areas of huge increase in menial work since our youth, I turn to a third huge area which didn't exist at all when we were young, recycling.

All over the country local authorities have recycling depots where we take ours to, and as we all know each has a number of staff in completely new unskilled jobs. The skipfulls of material then go on to dedicated recycling companies, where once again they employ large numbers of unskilled sorting and grading workers. Some automation has proved possible in those companies, but they still have to resort to manual stages of final sorting.

Which brings me onto another completely new area of manual work, the waste to power stations which are springing up now. We have a large one of these here where large numbers of unskilled workers are employed sorting and extracting unsuitable materials from the refuse on a long conveyer belt heading for the furnace.

No, I'm not finished yet, not by far. Take cars, when we were young the roads were virtually empty, but now they are clogged with around 30 million cars, all getting dirty. The automatic washing machines haven't found favour with many motorists so manual handwash stations have sprung up. They are everywhere, at garages, in car parks, random sites etc, employing countless thousands of unskilled workers.

Then there's the supermarkets that didn't exist when we were young but now are everywhere and dominate the retail sector. They overwhelmingly employ unskilled labour, warehousing, unloading, shelf stacking, checkouts, hundreds of thousands of completely new unskilled jobs that didn't exist when we were served in individual shops by people with skills in their supply area.

But of course we buy much online, supplied by the likes of Amazon from warehouses full of unskilled or semiskilled staff doing jobs that never use to exist.

And to deliver those goods we have a huge number of courier companies with many thousands of loading and driving jobs that didn't used to exist.

Then of course another vast new area of employment for the unskilled is fast food, which didn't exist when we were young but is now a massive national industry.

And how about minicabs in their countless thousands. When we were young and everyone much poorer, few could use taxis. But now almost everyone uses minicabs, creating a vast number of new unskilled jobs.

I could go on listing more, but I've shown that the number of new unskilled jobs overwhelmingly surpasses the small number lost to technology and qualifications that you've been able to give as examples

And far from there being a shortage of unskilled jobs, the vast increase in them has necessitated importing many hundreds of thousands of immigrants to fill the vacancies. That's not just in crop picking, it's in all of the areas I've listed.

The mistake you and many have made is in believing what the politicians say and the media and academia exaggerates. For years they've all propagated the lie that everyone has to be much better educated to be able to get a job at all, but they've always been wrong as I've showed above.

We've had Harold Wilson with his "white heat of technology", telling us we'd all be in an age of leisure by the millenium, with little need to work. In fact by the millennium we were telling the EU we couldn't manage with their 35 hour week and needed 48 hours. So much for the age of leisure.

We've had the idiot Blair with his "education, education, education" message, leading to half our young pointlessly going to university and getting degrees, only to find the only jobs for most of them are the unskilled ones I've listed.

And of course academia has a vested interest in promoting their false message.

So please ignore their message, just look at the facts. Since WW2 there's never been more unskilled employment than there is now. The range of unskilled jobs now available is immense.
.

Again again and again you have missed the essential point I was making. I was not extolling the merits of academic education. All I was saying and continue to say is that without basic literacy, and the ability to even get into the short list for a job such as any of these is seriously restricted. According to UK statistics, the number of illiterate people in the UK is about 660,000 people , whereas the number of functionally illiterate is , depending on severity and definition, upwards of 7 million.
Try a thought experiment for a minute , you find yourself in Ho Chi Minh city , and not in district 1 ,where all the embassies and hotels are located. Identify the streets, communicate with the people, find your way back.

 

[Zlatan]

I'm not taking it personally Danidl, I'm just trying to show you how hopelessly wrong you are on this subject. Read on and you'll discover that there are far more unskilled jobs now than at any other time since WW2.

I use to have a lot of respect for you, but now you are rapidly losing it. How many times must I say that we effectively have 100% literacy in this country, yet still you come back with the need to know the alphabet. How the on earth do you think all these people are texting on their smartphones?



This is completely untrue, there has been a huge expansion of unskilled menial jobs since our youth. When I was young large numbers were employed in manufacturing doing skilled or semi skilled jobs, but most of those jobs have disappeared and we've grown a service economy instead, as witness the huge increase in the number of office blocks in our towns and cities.

All those offices have occasioned huge growth in the number of cleaners, door, security and mailroom staff, all unskilled jobs. And here again you've shown your quaintly old fashioned view by saying cleaning is mostly done by women. It isn't, for decades office cleaning is overwhelmingly done by men. Even the youngsters I mentioned are all male. The reason is simple, office cleaning is done after business hours in the evening and overnight when many women need to be caring for their children.

Which brings me to the next area of huge expansion of unskilled jobs where women indeed do much of the work. That area is tourism which we've hugely expanded as an earner in place of lost manufacturing. That's brought a large increase in the hospitality industry, hotels etc, and thousands of jobs like chambermaid maintaining hotel rooms within school hours, so ideally suiting women. I need hardly list all the other unskilled jobs associated with tourism.

Having shown those two areas of huge increase in menial work since our youth, I turn to a third huge area which didn't exist at all when we were young, recycling.

All over the country local authorities have recycling depots where we take ours to, and as we all know each has a number of staff in completely new unskilled jobs. The skipfulls of material then go on to dedicated recycling companies, where once again they employ large numbers of unskilled sorting and grading workers. Some automation has proved possible in those companies, but they still have to resort to manual stages of final sorting.

Which brings me onto another completely new area of manual work, the waste to power stations which are springing up now. We have a large one of these here where large numbers of unskilled workers are employed sorting and extracting unsuitable materials from the refuse on a long conveyer belt heading for the furnace.

No, I'm not finished yet, not by far. Take cars, when we were young the roads were virtually empty, but now they are clogged with around 30 million cars, all getting dirty. The automatic washing machines haven't found favour with many motorists so manual handwash stations have sprung up. They are everywhere, at garages, in car parks, random sites etc, employing countless thousands of unskilled workers.

Then there's the supermarkets that didn't exist when we were young but now are everywhere and dominate the retail sector. They overwhelmingly employ unskilled labour, warehousing, unloading, shelf stacking, checkouts, hundreds of thousands of completely new unskilled jobs that didn't exist when we were served in individual shops by people with skills in their supply area.

But of course we buy much online, supplied by the likes of Amazon from warehouses full of unskilled or semiskilled staff doing jobs that never use to exist.

And to deliver those goods we have a huge number of courier companies with many thousands of loading and driving jobs that didn't used to exist.

Then of course another vast new area of employment for the unskilled is fast food, which didn't exist when we were young but is now a massive national industry.

And how about minicabs in their countless thousands. When we were young and everyone much poorer, few could use taxis. But now almost everyone uses minicabs, creating a vast number of new unskilled jobs.

I could go on listing more, but I've shown that the number of new unskilled jobs overwhelmingly surpasses the small number lost to technology and qualifications that you've been able to give as examples

And far from there being a shortage of unskilled jobs, the vast increase in them has necessitated importing many hundreds of thousands of immigrants to fill the vacancies. That's not just in crop picking, it's in all of the areas I've listed.

The mistake you and many have made is in believing what the politicians say and the media and academia exaggerates. For years they've all propagated the lie that everyone has to be much better educated to be able to get a job at all, but they've always been wrong as I've showed above.

We've had Harold Wilson with his "white heat of technology", telling us we'd all be in an age of leisure by the millenium, with little need to work. In fact by the millennium we were telling the EU we couldn't manage with their 35 hour week and needed 48 hours. So much for the age of leisure.

We've had the idiot Blair with his "education, education, education" message, leading to half our young pointlessly going to university and getting degrees, only to find the only jobs for most of them are the unskilled ones I've listed.

And of course academia has a vested interest in promoting their false message.

So please ignore their message, just look at the facts. Since WW2 there's never been more unskilled employment than there is now. The range of unskilled jobs now available is immense.
.

You forgot to mention lecturing Flecc.

 

[flecc]

Again again and again you have missed the essential point I was making. I was not extolling the merits of academic education. All I was saying and continue to say is that without basic literacy, and the ability to even get into the short list for a job such as any of these is seriously restricted. According to UK statistics, the number of illiterate people in the UK is about 660,000 people , whereas the number of functionally illiterate is , depending on severity and definition, upwards of 7 million.
Try a thought experiment for a minute , you find yourself in Ho Chi Minh city , and not in district 1 ,where all the embassies and hotels are located. Identify the streets, communicate with the people, find your way back.

Functionally illiterate is meaningless in the context of many of the jobs I mentioned which the functionally illiterate can do and do. Again I think you are guilty of underrating the ability of others. And where on earth have you got Ho Chi Minh city from in the basic jobs I mentioned? None of them require any foreign travel whatsoever.

As for the official 660,000, that's just 1% of the population, hardly cause for saying we have a major problem. In any case I don't accept that figure as unemployable since first, we have employment quotas for the disadvantaged for major companies and governments departments, and second, that they can be employed in many of the functions I mentioned. No-one needs to be literate to wash cars, clean windows or floors and illiterate people are anyway far more capable than you give them credit for.

And as for your mention of getting onto shortlists for jobs, most of those I mentioned never have shortlists. As long as applicants have four limbs and show willing, they get hired.
.

 

[Danidl]

Functionally illiterate is meaningless in the context of many of the jobs I mentioned which the functionally illiterate can do and do. Again I think you are guilty of underrating the ability of others. And where on earth have you got Ho Chi Minh city from in the basic jobs I mentioned? None of them require any foreign travel whatsoever.

As for the official 660,000, that's just 1% of the population, hardly cause for saying we have a major problem. In any case I don't accept that figure as unemployable since first, we have employment quotas for the disadvantaged for major companies and governments departments, and second, that they can be employed in many of the functions I mentioned. No-one needs to be literate to wash cars, windows or floors and illiterate people are far more capable than you give them credit for.
.

To an illiterate person, it would be not different than finding oneself in a foreign country, with a different alphabet.

 

[oldgroaner]

I had a look at the roster earlier, and I can give you annual leave if you’d like to take the day off. I’ve also had a word with fingers and he will cover if anything urgent comes in.

Hope you have a peaceful Christmas Day.

You too my friend

 

[flecc]

To an illiterate person, it would be not different than finding oneself in a foreign country, with a different alphabet.

Oh dear, you really do seem to lack any practical experience in this area. Illiterate people are often very clever in hiding their disadvantage and have no such problem.

Someone who is still a good friend to this day was a warehouseman in the last company I joined. A good reliable employee and a driving licence holder, I later moved him up to a truck driver position which he also performed well, delivering all over Southern and Eastern England for me.

One day he asked me for some advice on a multi page government form he needed filled in. Helping him with that I discovered to my astonishment that he couldn't read to any usable extent, yet for some five years he'd be doing a job involving stock control and navigating over a vast area of the country in the pre SatNav days, effectively hiding his problem.

Together with another staff member I helped him with that over time and he quickly learnt sufficiently to function reasonably well independently.

He completed 17 years employment with me and today runs a large chain of flats in South London for a wealthy investor, collecting rents where necessary, arranging maintenance and repairs, doing that for almost two decades now.

It's an illustration of how a onetime illiterate person can function well while hidden but also go on to achieve. That's no surprise to me since I have other examples where I've had employees supposedly with dyslexia and or discalculia, but those easily overcome. I've long since learnt never to underrate on the superficial evidence.

I'm confident that many of those estimated 660,000 can perform as well, given the chance.
.

 

[OxygenJames]

I found the perfect friend for OG: