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ianpii

Listed below are comments made by ianpii between Tuesday, 12th May 2009 and Tuesday, 20th October 2009.

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Map of the Week: Addressing educational underachievement 8:13pm on 20 Oct 2009 #40 and #41 - Your statements agree very closely with my experiences and what I see happening around me.

#42 - Absolute liberty does indeed equal anarchy. However, capitalism by its very nature requires rules and laws to exist. No rules means no requirement to purchase, therefore there is no profit to be made as nothing will be sold if you can just take with no repercussions. No-one has the impetus to create a business for the purpose of making profit. Therefore a free market cannot possibly aim towards anarchy. If you cannot see the severe mismatch in your logic, then there is little point in trying to discuss it with you.
Map of the Week: Addressing educational underachievement 2:07pm on 20 Oct 2009 #32 - I disagree. At the most extreme, big business and capitalist goverments don't want anarchy - that's bad for profit. They want subsurvience, which is the diametric opposite. They want the power to control your lives to their ends.

#36 - Possibly the West Midlands is bad example, because the heavy industry was throughout the area. Brierley Hill, Stourbridge and the towns which now make up Sandwell are on the western side of the connurbation, not the East. There are high unemployment and low educational achievement areas throughout all the areas and the lower unemployment, higher educationally achieving areas are merely around the edges, away from where the industry was. I would agree, however, that if you look at the majority of towns and cities, it does seem to be the case. Even within the West Mids connurbation you can still see it to a point. The housing is on the north west of Birmingham, the industry was primarily on the east side. I can but assume that the connurbation just grew to fill the gaps.

However this isn't about the importance of vocational training versus education, as I see it. It's about improving the situation for those who find themselves in the low achievement "traps" formed by the almost total loss of low-qualification, mainly manual, labour in this country. Many of those jobs were highly skilled. People who cannot achieve educationally are often very skilled and it is a mistake, in my opinion, to differentiate between learned and honed skills and learned and honed knowledge. We value the latter far more than the former. Should that be the case?
Map of the Week: Addressing educational underachievement 1:12pm on 20 Oct 2009 ...and my post also shows that education doesn't necessarily help with proofreading when typing in a hurry. Errors and sarcastic replies accepted. My apologies to those confused by by apparently inability to use a keyboard on Tuesday lunchtime.
Map of the Week: Addressing educational underachievement 11:51am on 20 Oct 2009 We were recently discussing this in our office, from the perspective of two comparatively well educated people sitting in an office, who both happen to live in an educatuinally under-achieving area of the West Midlands.

The comment I made then is equally valid to this discussion I believe and it echoes the comments of others here about parents and close family being of ciritical employment.

The people on my local sink estates used to work for British Steel. They had massive amounts of land, were the region's largest employer by a massive margin. They're gone. Nothing came in to replace them. The steel mills, foundries and treatment sites that employed tens of thousands are now distribution depots employing a few hundred. The cafes, the shops, the infrastructure that supported those tens of thousands have gone. There was no need for them any more.

We have houses going up left right and centre on old industrial sites, gentrifying the areas wonderfully, but the people on the local council estates who did manual work for their entire lives until redundancy are hardly the best examples for now their grandchildren and great grandchildren. When your entire family extended family has had nothing but menial work or been living on benefits since the 1980s, what example is there to show how getting good results at school will lead to anything different than "dossing off" and being disruptive in the classroom? Even those that do go to University are coming back and getting "shift manager" jobs at McBurgerFriedPizza which really don't need a degree.

Education for education's sake won't work with the majority of these people, because they can see no point in it or result from it. If, on the other hand, they could be doing apprenticeships, learning how to do something practical while bringing money in and clearly improving their lives at the same time, would that not have more effect? Unfortunately politicians, many employers and big money don't see it that way, so I doubt we'll be seeing any shift soon.

Incidentally, I spent two years working building computers after leaving thr forces. When I left, the minimum qualification for plugging two circuit boards together and some cables in was a degree. That was in 1992. This isn't a sudden new phenomenon caused by Blair or Brown, it was started well back into the Major and Thatcher years and merely continued by their successors in Government.
Map of the Week: Forgotten white working classes 2:50pm on 14 Oct 2009 #1 has a point. #2 does not.

Looking at old photos of the (ex council, now almost entirely privately owned) estate in a "deprived" area of the West Midlands on which I live, it's an interesting comparison to what you see now.

Then there were few cars, but a lot of pristine gardens. There was pride, if not money. Now you look around the estate and most of the gardens are concreted over, some with three or four battered and rusting cars around them, others of which have parking for two cars - neither of which are around during the day, but are there all weekend. Some gardens are regularly tended and look excellent. Others (like ours) are tended irregularly and when possible. Others are totally overgrown with weeds and in a state of total disrepair. I was not surprised to find that most of the latter are rented - not from the council, but from private landlords. The landlords are not local and don't care for maintenance above the legal minimums. The tenants don't care about maintenance because it's the landlord's problem.

I strongly suspect that the same applies to council tenants in many areas, with shrinking council maintenance budgets and staffing levels combined with a "not my problem" attitude from the tenants.

How many of these "deprived" and "forgotten" areas are simply the result of people who want all the problems to be resolved by someone else and not themselves? It's easier to blame someone else than take responsibility for your own lack of action.

Me? Guilty as charged. I really do need to find a way of repairing the unclipped bit of guttering on the end of our house, but I blame no-one for not doing so other than myself.
'Labour's lost it,' says the Sun 08:02am on 30 Sep 2009 I can't help but smile when I see The Sun - always a follower of, rather than a leader of - the mood in the country finally, eventually, jumping on the bandwagon. Was there seriously a single person in the country who didn't expect this populist rag to jump on the popular bandwagon? When the Tories are in exactly the same boat in ten years or so, it'll be Da Sun Wot Wun for Labour once again.

I have no hopes at all for the expected next Tory Government in this country, the same as I never had for Blair or Brown. They'll announce how they're going to "save" us all, then proceed to work towards keeping themselves in power, helping their friends and fiddling around the edges and actually solving nothing.

The problem for me, like many people in this country, is that I will have a choice between voting for liars or voting for hypocrites, all of them (other than those I would never even consider voting for) campaigning on why we shouldn't vote for the other guy, rather than actually setting out policies that they are willing to carry out and capable of carrying out.

And then people wonder why turnout is so low on election day... But remember, It Woz Da Sun Wot Wun It. Right?
Will T'Orange be good for shoppers? 11:37am on 09 Sep 2009 Virgin, Tesco, whoever, Mobile - The "MNVOs" - have no infrastructure of their own. They use the networks of the larger companies (Orange, O2, Voda, etc.) to carry their calls, much like many landline service providers use the BT network to carry data and calls (most DSL services, for example).

Therefore while you pay Virgin, you are actually using T-Mobile's (if I remember correctly - I am probably wrong on that) network. Because they pay someone else as their overhead, rather than directly supporting the physical infrastructure, they have a lot more freedom as to how they target and market their product.
Gray report: Brakes put on 12:37pm on 07 Aug 2009 Although this blog post is about defence spending, the overall problem is endemic amongst large "public" projects in the UK.

I work in a transport industry, where projects are being driven down constantly in terms of timescale and cost (the same as military spending), the effects/benefits are wanted immediately yet the planning and implementation actually needed to be done years ago (the same as military spending).

What do we end up doing? Chasing our tails and the client around in ever decreasing circles, because they reduced the time by not doing the project development properly. Then no-one will actually make major decisions without meeting after meeting after meeting and everyone at the top is spending more time and money covering their career prospects than making what they actually need to do work.

As I said before, this may directly be about defence spending but, in reality, it's a problem across the board with publicly funded and/or run projects. Both public expectation and senior management attitude need major changes before problems like these disappear.

Decide what you want, take advice to get it right, then order it and ensure it is delivered!
Pubs aren't dying - they are evolving 2:45pm on 31 Jul 2009 I certainly fail to see any "evolving" around us. It could easily be said that there were too many pubs in the area to start with (they were everywhere) but even as a non-drinking, non-smoking, rather anti-social type it's very depressing to see six of the ten pubs within easy walking distance of our house, plus many more in the area, which are boarded up with large signs announcing "ALL PROPERTY OF VALUE HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM THIS BUILDING".

Doesn't look much like evolution to me. Looks a lot more like closure. Two more are up for sale, with signs practically begging someone to come and take them over "for the community".

It does seem to have increased the numbers smoking outside those that remain, though!
How damaging is illegal file-sharing? 08:08am on 12 May 2009 File sharing isn't illegal. Huge amounts of entirely legal applications, such as many of the most popular current games, use Peer-to-Peer to make patches and updates available. If the ISPs start throttling or kicking people for using P2P applications and protocols, they'll hit the legitimate users far more than the illegitimate ones, who will just switch to different methods of getting what they want. The ISPs know this. It appears that the "creative industries" as this report calls them either don't know or don't care.

This report, like so many others, is totally missing the point - primarily because, as usual, it's funded by the same big business that was going to be utterly destroyed by tape and video recording facilities being available to the masses, yet survived.

The people who are being hurt are the low-volume, low value, creators such as small software houses and studios, who still have to pay staff and still have to pay bills, but only sell a couple of hundred copies of what they create at most. The music and film industries cry into their bank balances that they "only" made x number of millions profit this year. The smaller companies regularly don't make a profit at all on what they create, or one that barely covers living costs.

The whole debate about breach of copyright is being skewed by people who see it as an opportunity to line their own pockets a bit thicker, rather than by those it is really hurting. Because any vaguely intelligent person can see that the music and film industries are hurting themselves more than they are helping with the hyperbole and over-stated claims, they write off the entire problem as non-existent. It isn't, it's just that you rarely hear from the people who it really hurts, because they can't afford to commission reports and pay PR companies to put forward their perspective and the real effects that illegal file sharing and breach of copyright have.

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