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UK Politics: The Tory leadership (disg)race to the bottom and beyond - not worth a Penny.


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14 minutes ago, maarsen said:

There is a spot for useless degrees, especially if one is born into the upper class. It lets you pretend to be educated when working at the family firm. Having plebs with the same or better qualifications around reduces your value making you replaceable. Not to mention the problem of being compared to the lessers and being found wanting.

The problems occur when the plebs who might not be able to live off daddy’s inheritance also leave uni with similarly useless qualifications 

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Looks like the energy cap will be going up from £1400 to £4200 in January, not the £2800 they had been scaring us with.

Meanwhile, energy company accounts are looking to double their record profits from earlier this year.

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The idea that any degrees are 'useless' (as opposed to In The Old Days, when the exact same degrees carried an enormous earning premium) is objectively and according to independent research, bunk. After universities and HE institutions across the UK being subjected to extensive review for literally decades, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of degree courses that were actually found to be a problem.

The issue is not that degrees are useless. The issue is not even, contrary to what many assume, that there are too many graduates. The issue is that the UK economy is fundamentally broken. Blaming universities and 'useless' degrees is scapegoating, which is why it's so attractive to politicians. 

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12 minutes ago, mormont said:

The issue is that the UK economy is fundamentally broken.

Out of interest, how do you consider the UK economy fundamentally broken (in ways that other similar capitalist democracies aren't)?

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33 minutes ago, mormont said:

The idea that any degrees are 'useless' (as opposed to In The Old Days, when the exact same degrees carried an enormous earning premium) is objectively and according to independent research, bunk. After universities and HE institutions across the UK being subjected to extensive review for literally decades, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of degree courses that were actually found to be a problem.

The issue is not that degrees are useless. The issue is not even, contrary to what many assume, that there are too many graduates. The issue is that the UK economy is fundamentally broken. Blaming universities and 'useless' degrees is scapegoating, which is why it's so attractive to politicians. 

Is it bunk?  I HAVE a useless degree, I know it was useless. I know I spent 4 years of my life going to university for something that was essentially a scam by an institution to gather up cash and teach me next to nothing, to gain a certificate that had no baring on my ability to do a job in the future, and no, it didn't teach me any soft skills or make a more rounded human being. It just cost me a lot of money and was something I was told I HAD to do if I wanted to not live in the gutter.

It meant that I didn't get into the job market till too late in life, I had a bunch of debt behind me, I had no skills to actually work in a company. I had to spend 2 years after leaving uni working in shops and bars, spending my evenings teaching myself skills that might be useful to businesses. That is what has allowed me to have a career, not going to university, which for a lot of people is just a bit of a piss up. I know I am hardly alone in this, I struggle to think of anyone I know who did a degree even tangentially related to their final career, it was just a tick box exercise, something they 'had' to do. 
 

33 minutes ago, mormont said:

The issue is not that degrees are useless. The issue is not even, contrary to what many assume, that there are too many graduates. The issue is that the UK economy is fundamentally broken. Blaming universities and 'useless' degrees is scapegoating, which is why it's so attractive to politicians. 

One of the reasons the economy is so broken is the Blair experiment with sending almost the entire population of the country to university. Now everyone has an expectation of a well paying job, no skills to actually do those jobs, no pathways in to companies except for taking pathetic slave labour internships which nobody can afford to do unless they live at home. 

Fixing the education system, as well as fixing the utterly broken housing market should be some of the main priorities of any government. 

 

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46 minutes ago, Which Tyler said:

Looks like the energy cap will be going up from £1400 to £4200 in January, not the £2800 they had been scaring us with.

 

I might have to gi sick when the riots start. The poll tax had nothing on the current situation. 

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15 minutes ago, Mentat said:

Out of interest, how do you consider the UK economy fundamentally broken (in ways that other similar capitalist democracies aren't)?

A lot of the ways it's broken are similar to other capitalist democracies, to be fair. But in terms of more unique problems, the UK has for a very long time had a chronic problem with low productivity, and successive governments, despite promising to address this, don't even really seem to understand what is causing it. There's an argument that this has even contributed to the relatively good employment figures in recent years: you need more staff if productivity is low. 

Producing more graduates should help to improve productivity, but this can only happen if the increased skills are put to use. Graduates, no matter what their degree, have useful skills: critical thinking, problem solving, communication skills, willingness to learn, reading and research, many more. But if they're not trained to or asked to or able to use those in their job, that's a waste. 

There's more on that here:

https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/06/09/britains-productivity-problem-is-long-standing-and-getting-worse

On top of that, we have specific skills shortages that need to be addressed in the short term by immigration but of course we treat immigrants badly. in theory we have skilled immigration routes but in practice, it's not possible to send a message that we absolutely won't take some immigrants but would love to have others. But lots of Western countries are struggling with that. 

We do have a class problem that's worse than many other Western countries as well, of course. And there are demographic problems, and the other long standing unique UK issue of having an economy that can be divided into 'London' and 'everywhere else'. I could go on and on. But the one thing that I can definitively say isn't a significant issue in the UK economy in any way is 'useless degrees'. 
 

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57 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

it just cost me a lot of money and was something I was told I HAD to do if I wanted to not live in the gutter.

I ain't got no university degree. I don't even have a single GCSE to my name. But by the time I gave up work to look after my brother, I was earning six figures and splitting my time between London and Paris, managing huge, multi-million, multinational IT projects.

So it looks like you got mugged. :P

 

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48 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Is it bunk?  I HAVE a useless degree, I know it was useless. I know I spent 4 years of my life going to university for something that was essentially a scam by an institution to gather up cash and teach me next to nothing, to gain a certificate that had no baring on my ability to do a job in the future, and no, it didn't teach me any soft skills or make a more rounded human being. It just cost me a lot of money and was something I was told I HAD to do if I wanted to not live in the gutter.

It meant that I didn't get into the job market till too late in life, I had a bunch of debt behind me, I had no skills to actually work in a company. I had to spend 2 years after leaving uni working in shops and bars, spending my evenings teaching myself skills that might be useful to businesses. That is what has allowed me to have a career, not going to university, which for a lot of people is just a bit of a piss up. I know I am hardly alone in this, I struggle to think of anyone I know who did a degree even tangentially related to their final career, it was just a tick box exercise, something they 'had' to do. 
 

One of the reasons the economy is so broken is the Blair experiment with sending almost the entire population of the country to university. Now everyone has an expectation of a well paying job, no skills to actually do those jobs, no pathways in to companies except for taking pathetic slave labour internships which nobody can afford to do unless they live at home.
 

I am somewhat in agreement with this, but I also think Mormont is right in it not being primarily the fault of the education system.

I see the root of the UK's problem lies in in deifying management roles and denigrating almost all technical hands on ones. An attitude that is now so pervasive as to have reached even the teaching and medical professions. Only finance and possibly the law seem exempt (and being societal constructs, you could make an argument as to how technical they truly are). In many countries "engineer" is an honoured title, in the UK it tends to conjure up the image of someone in dirty overalls carrying a spanner. Those of us who identify as engineers have to get our sense of self worth from our peers and within ourselves (and the fact that scarcity value means they have to grudgingly pay at least some of us pretty well). It sometimes seems to me that the ideal UK corporation is considered to be one that takes on contacts and outsources all the work on to other outsourcing companies, basically a just thin veneer that extracts a slice of the money going through, while adding bureaucracy. I could cite numerous supporting anecdotes.

This means that degree courses are slanted away from vocational subjects and more towards ones for students with aspirations to become managers, because those are what students, understandably, want to do. So it is scarcely surprising we end up with a glut of would be managers who end up making tea if they are lucky.

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2 minutes ago, A wilding said:

This means that degree courses are slanted away from vocational subjects and more towards ones for students with aspirations to become managers, because those are what students, understandably, want to do. So it is scarcely surprising we end up with a glut of would be managers who end up making tea if they are lucky.

What I think is ironic is that many of the jobs that would have been looked down upon when I was at school preparing for Uni, jobs like carpentry, electrician, builder, will pay FAR more than the jobs that were seen as more prestigious such as being a middle manager in a paper clip company! People at school who go into 'the trades' are raking it in, being able to latch onto the housing boom and pay tax in 'clever' ways.

My issue is really the narrative that you HAVE to go to university if you want to succeed. That doesn't tie into reality at all, and what I've seen a lot of is aimless 20 somethings still trying to work out what they want to do with their lives by the time they hit their 30s, with no money behind them, still unable to get a proper job or career. Of course there are a lot of reasons for that and it isn't solely about the University system. This all tied into the globalisation trend of outsourcing all the crappy jobs to other countries or cheap immigrant labour, with the dream of the UK being a country of highly educated office workers. I'm not sure it was obvious what the downsides of all that would be. 

There are however a number of educational institutions that just pump out courses to make money, riding on the backs of a culture where having a degree.. any degree, is seen as a mark of value... until of course everyone has them and they become basically worthless.

 

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10 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

There are however a number of educational institutions that just pump out courses to make money, riding on the backs of a culture where having a degree.. any degree, is seen as a mark of value... until of course everyone has them and they become basically worthless.

I agree about the stupid "tick in the box" attitude towards degrees in many companies. Interestingly, in some circles, a degree is now no longer enough, you have also to have a PhD (however meaningless or irrelevant). I find it hard not to see that as partly a way of maintaining a hereditary class system, as mentioned previously, limiting roles those those with family resources to fund an extra 3 years.

Anecdote: at one company I worked at not long ago an extremely able junior IT guy who had been with the company for years, ever since he was 18, was denied a thoroughly deserved promotion just because he did not have a degree. He promptly left for a better job elsewhere, leaving a significant hole. It did cause a bit of a shock wave through the management, but ultimately I don't think that anything changed.

 

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12 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

What I think is ironic is that many of the jobs that would have been looked down upon when I was at school preparing for Uni, jobs like carpentry, electrician, builder, will pay FAR more than the jobs that were seen as more prestigious such as being a middle manager in a paper clip company! People at school who go into 'the trades' are raking it in, being able to latch onto the housing boom and pay tax in 'clever' ways.

My issue is really the narrative that you HAVE to go to university if you want to succeed. That doesn't tie into reality at all, and what I've seen a lot of is aimless 20 somethings still trying to work out what they want to do with their lives by the time they hit their 30s, with no money behind them, still unable to get a proper job or career. Of course there are a lot of reasons for that and it isn't solely about the University system. This all tied into the globalisation trend of outsourcing all the crappy jobs to other countries or cheap immigrant labour, with the dream of the UK being a country of highly educated office workers. I'm not sure it was obvious what the downsides of all that would be. 

There are however a number of educational institutions that just pump out courses to make money, riding on the backs of a culture where having a degree.. any degree, is seen as a mark of value... until of course everyone has them and they become basically worthless.

 

That narrative is long gone. The kids of people I worked with, on leaving school, tend to go for apprenticeships.

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2 hours ago, Which Tyler said:

Looks like the energy cap will be going up from £1400 to £4200 in January, not the £2800 they had been scaring us with.

Meanwhile, energy company accounts are looking to double their record profits from earlier this year.

Fuck. If this doesn't get people to see what the Tories are all about I don't know what will. Or will the masses still vote for the people happily watching them starve and freeze to death because <checks notes> immigrants taking our jobs?

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Just now, Poobah said:

Fuck. If this doesn't get people to see what the Tories are all about I don't know what will. Or will the masses still vote for the people happily watching them starve and freeze to death because <checks notes> immigrants taking our jobs?

Apparently Johnson would love to help but he can't do anything because 'convention' says that he can't make fiscal commitments as a caretaker PM. Which is odd, because when people were telling him 'convention' said he had to resign, he didn't seem to pay it much mind. 

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They are taking the piss. And the Tories are enabling them, and will continue to do so as long as they're taking millions and millions of 'donations' from oil and gas.

So, sign up for this. 

And, yes, I know, not paying your energy bill is not to be taken lightly. It can have all kinds of negative impacts on consumers.

But it probably won't come to that. Because any impact on consumers would pale into insignificance compared to the impact on energy companies of a million customers cancelling their direct debits and refusing to pay their bills.

They know this. Government knows this. And that's why the threat of consumer action will probably result in more government-funded assistance.

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4 hours ago, mormont said:

The idea that any degrees are 'useless' (as opposed to In The Old Days, when the exact same degrees carried an enormous earning premium) is objectively and according to independent research, bunk. After universities and HE institutions across the UK being subjected to extensive review for literally decades, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of degree courses that were actually found to be a problem.

The issue is not that degrees are useless. The issue is not even, contrary to what many assume, that there are too many graduates. The issue is that the UK economy is fundamentally broken. Blaming universities and 'useless' degrees is scapegoating, which is why it's so attractive to politicians. 

A policing degree begs to differ. All it does is teach you in 3 years what you previously learned in 18 weeks at training school and 10 weeks being mentored. 

And excludes a significant number of working class people who can't afford to get saddled with debt for the shit pay. None of the best street police (proper thief takers) went to uni. They were all working working class, poacher turned gamekeeper. We don't get them anymore. 

My wife also said her TV production degree would have been less benefit than 6 months as a runner learning the ropes. 

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