Reply to: UKIP!

[doodab]

TV generates a lot of money, as does tourism

If you want a job in the media industry electrical engineering is a arguably a better route in than media studies. Someone has to keep all the technology working.

[Zero Liability]

I'm sure according to vultures the prey should just lay down and be still.

The vultures have everything they need already, as it is. They've no need for laissez-faire and the risk it poses to them.

Anyway, the concerning thing about this election has been the resurgence of Labour. I hope Millipede remains their leader, to quash any hopes of an electoral resurgence at the GE.

Where and how do you draw the line then? The easy viewpoint is "engineering good, media studies bad" but that's pretty anachronistic. If we're talking about basing it on economics then making something "real" is not intrinsically better than a service, if both generate income. TV generates a lot of money, as does tourism. And then subjects like English & History are generally recognised as "serious, worthwhile" degrees but offer less direct pathways to work than a media/graphics design degree. And then there are degrees in social science, youth-work, etc which invariably lead to very low-paid jobs which are arguably very important.

Suggestions?

I agree with you, not all "traditional" degrees make for marketable subjects, and to that extent you could treat them as luxury goods, there to be paid for out of the consumer's pocket.

There's no foolproof way of assessing this other than to see what the market suggests regarding skill shortages, i.e. which areas are commanding higher and higher wages as a result of worker scarcity. A few years ago there were droves of graduates heading into law, so much so that universities could not keep up. Now you have loads of law graduates employed as glorified office workers, a.k.a. paralegals. I'm not very confident the government can do a good job of this, however this has to be better than indiscriminately funding any degree one wishes to study. Whilst people are saying universities and colleges are reacting to market demand, this is is only in a limited sense, and again only because said consumer has a pocket enlarged courtesy of the taxpaying public.

Professional development loans at least have the right idea behind them of being tied to the development of marketable professional skills.

[darmstadt]

That's interesting D, what newspaper was it from?

PS Oh a blog. I believe everything I read in blogs.

Yep, a blog but I did go and check (most) of the figures and they are correct and it does make some interesting reading. Currently looking at Europe wide figures which make some interesting reading too...





(* I did see a post about Ukip members celebrating the Front National wins but can't find anything so taking that with a very big pinch of salt)

[xoggoth]

That's interesting D, what newspaper was it from?

PS Oh a blog. I believe everything I read in blogs.

[darmstadt]

Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers!!!


Labour:

Labour did not do badly, they made net gains of over 330 council seats to bag more than half of all of the council seats up for election. They made a net gain of five councils, and Labour party gains also resulted in the Tories losing several councils to No Overall Control.

The media has painted these results as a disaster for Labour, but they gained almost three times as many new seats as the UKIP "earthquake" and they took complete control of Amber Valley, Bradford, Cambridge, Crawley, Croydon, Harrow and Merton.

UKIP:

UKIP did not cause an earthquake. In reality they won far fewer seats than even the politically toxic Liberal Democrats managed. They did manage to pick up over 160 new council seats, but they were scattered far and wide across the country, meaning that they gained control of precisely zero councils.

The really clear indicator that this was no UKIP earthquake was the fact that their share of the vote actually declined dramatically from the local council elections last year (from 22% down to 17%), and this decline happened despite the council elections coinciding with the Euro elections, which should have brought out lots of extra UKIP voters.

Conservative:

In order to spin the narrative that Labour were the big losers (despite gaining well over 300 seats) the press had to talk down the big losses suffered by the Tories.

The Tories lost control of 12 councils, suffered a net loss of over 170 seats, and found themselves edged out of the possibility of re-forming coalitions in several of the No Overall Control councils too.

Lib-Dems:

The Liberal Democrats' suffered heavy losses, and their days of hoovering up protest votes are clearly over, but they have managed to protect five of the six Lib-Dem councils they were defending.

If gaining an extra 300 seats to take more than half of the total council seats up for election was some kind of disaster for Labour, losing over 300 seats (over 40% of the seats they were defending) is hardly a roaring success for the Lib Dems,

London:

The Guardian used some very crude statistics to print a ludicrous story claiming that the only area of the country that rejected UKIP was London. They compared the pro-UKIP vote in London (7%) with the aggregated average for the entire rest of the country (about 20%), as if the rest of the country is some kind of homogenous blob. The narrative of the story being that London is an enlightened city full of educated, cultured and well-informed people, whilst the rest of the country is inhabited by backwards, uneducated UKIP voting yokels. It's hardly surprising that the London based Guardian would come up with a narrative that is so contemptuous of the rest of the country, but the actual facts paint a very different picture.

A quick look at the results illustrate how UKIP were comprehensively rejected in major towns and cities across parts of the country.

North West - Out of the 243 council seats up for grabs in Manchester, Liverpool and Preston, UKIP won Zero.
North East - Out of the 219 council seats up for grabs in Newcastle, Sunderland and Gateshead, UKIP won zero.
Midlands - Out of the 224 council seats up for grabs in Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton, UKIP won one single seat.
Yorkshire - Out of the 242 sets up for grabs in Leeds, Sheffield and Hull, UKIP won just four seats (three of them in Sheffield).

Another way that we can demonstrate how the Guardian's crude use of statistics is completely counter-factual is through comparison of UKIP support in some specific London boroughs with UKIP support in some of the aforementioned cities.

There were more UKIP councilors elected in each of three single London boroughs than in the combined cities of Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, and Leeds (combined population 2.6 million).

Despite having a population of just 232,000 the London Borough of Bexley elected three UKIP councilors. Bromley (population 310,00) elected two UKIP councilors and Havering (238,000) returned seven UKIP councilors.

As it turns out, there are boroughs of London that are far more keen on UKIP than some of the former industrial cities of the North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands, but why would the London centric media let facts get in the way of a good story about the divide between smart and savvy Londoners and the disgusting uneducated yokels in the rest of the country?

[vetran]

Would compulsory euthanasia of severely disabled babies at birth be acceptable if satisfaction efficient?

depends how you set the parameters of efficiency. I think we are talking about working within normal parameters but using logic rather than the likelihood of getting a vote or a backhander.

[vetran]

According to the advocates of free markets it equates to laissez faire capitalism.

I'm sure according to vultures the prey should just lay down and be still.

[d000hg]

I'd agree with that only in respect of the courses that provide the skills that the country needs and which actually benefit the students by allowing them to get higher wages (actually the same thing given the way markets work). Charges should remain or even be increased for some courses that do neither.

Since most educational institutions are state-funded, an alternative would be to cut funding for pointless degrees, both for the college/university and the individual applying to the course.

Where and how do you draw the line then? The easy viewpoint is "engineering good, media studies bad" but that's pretty anachronistic. If we're talking about basing it on economics then making something "real" is not intrinsically better than a service, if both generate income. TV generates a lot of money, as does tourism. And then subjects like English & History are generally recognised as "serious, worthwhile" degrees but offer less direct pathways to work than a media/graphics design degree. And then there are degrees in social science, youth-work, etc which invariably lead to very low-paid jobs which are arguably very important.

Suggestions?

[doodab]

why should ruling by logic not emotion equate to Nazism? Possibly communism.

According to the advocates of free markets it equates to laissez faire capitalism.

[vetran]

Is that a reading from Mein Kampf? :nazi:

why should ruling by logic not emotion equate to Nazism? Possibly communism.

Seems eminently sensible to me. We seem to spend far too much time trying to make pressure groups happy and not enough time making sure that we do the simple things right.

[speling bee]

Personally I think society would be best run by engineers who do not get involved in emotion, ideals or any concern for individuals. They should treat laws as they would machines, people as they would raw materials and design the process to provide the highest yield of human satisfaction.

All necessary wisdom is to be found in the Church of The Blessed Perry

Would compulsory euthanasia of severely disabled babies at birth be acceptable if satisfaction efficient?

[Unix]

Personally I think society would be best run by engineers who do not get involved in emotion, ideals or any concern for individuals. They should treat laws as they would machines, people as they would raw materials and design the process to provide the highest yield of human satisfaction.

All necessary wisdom is to be found in the Church of The Blessed Perry

Is that a reading from Mein Kampf? :nazi:

[Mich the Tester]

Personally I think society would be best run by engineers who do not get involved in emotion, ideals or any concern for individuals. They should treat laws as they would machines, people as they would raw materials and design the process to provide the highest yield of human satisfaction.

All necessary wisdom is to be found in the Church of The Blessed Perry

Hmmm, take a look at these films some time... All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - Watch Free Documentary Online

That idea sounds great but could become quite dystopian.

[doodab]

Personally I think society would be best run by engineers who do not get involved in emotion, ideals or any concern for individuals. They should treat laws as they would machines, people as they would raw materials and design the process to provide the highest yield of human satisfaction.

All necessary wisdom is to be found in the Church of The Blessed Perry

I agree, it's basically an optimization problem. I do think you have to constrain the distribution of the "yield of human satisfaction" somewhat in order to avoid social unrest though. This seems to be where most forms of social organisation have fallen down, historically speaking. Some measure of social unrest can probably be tolerated, I suppose to account for it you need to attribute a negative value to the dissatisfaction felt by certain members of society and include that in the overall sum.

There is a branch of maths that deals with this sort of distribution problem already, though it's an active research area so new ideas are coming along all the time. It's quite interesting stuff. There is also a lot of illuminating research and experimentation in what is known as "behavioral economics". I reckon in 20-30 years or so we'll have enough theory and scientific evidence to enable rational social organisation without recourse to dogma. The main problem as I see it lies in actually measuring satisfaction, as determining each persons subjective value function requires asking them and people are prone to fibbing if they think it will make them better off.

My guess (and it is a guess, although I suppose I could have a crack at proving it if I was better at maths) is the old capitalism vs socialism debate will be put to bed when it's proven that a mixed strategy bests either pure strategy.

[BrilloPad]

Personally I think society would be best run by engineers who do not get involved in emotion, ideals or any concern for individuals.

That already happens. All politicians care about is getting re-elected.

We need society to be run by people get involved in emotion, ideals and have concern for individuals.