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And worst of all, the East Europeans are moving back home, so even if the building trades were healthy, the quality of workmanship will drop dramatically and entire buildings will collapse.
When I was having quotes for building work 3 Polish lads came round, stayed a fair while and gave me by far the highest price of the lot.
I went with one of the lower ones. The final price came out higher than the Polish lads. The builders actually struggled, figuring out along the way that this actually needed doing (it did) and that (it did). Exactly everything that the Poles said.
I'd only hire Poles now. Some are bad of course but by far their work rate/quality is better than some local **** who turns up.
IF 'they' do all go home we'll be left with tat again.
Its looking pretty lean even over in Asia though no where near as bad as the UK when I left in mid-2010, has it actualy got worse?
Oops double post
thisisnotaspoon - MemberTo counter that, everyone I know who graduated with an engineering degree is either employed and earning very good money or made a decison after being made redundant to go traveling instead and hasn't come back! One guy in my class got lucky and is is practicaly semi-retired at 27 living in Cornwall and doing consulting work and surfing in aproximately equal measure!
But then 'editorial' sounds like media studies to me.
So your friends did worthwhile degrees & not Dog grooming & flower arranging so they could go on the piss for 3/4 years...
Japan experienced a 'lost decade' of no/very weak growth not so long ago.
Why is that a bad thing? They have managed to protect high living standards and public services despite no growth. Steady state is where it's at now.
IMHO it's £90K poorly spent
that depends if you can bring 200 people to your stand and then wine and dine them for an evening too. i was party to this kind of operation at a Cystic fibrosis conference and as far as the exhibitor was concerned it worked out a couple of £K per target delegate. but these people are spending millions of pounds on their drugs so money well spent as far as they are concerned.
Yip - the economic powers-that-be in Europe have a fantastic track record of effectively and efficiently investing for the future, don't they?
I didn't say it was currently being done effectively.
I said it was possible.
No good political discussion was ever had whilst foaming at the mouth, binners... Relax, and put your point across thoughtfully and patiently, not vehemently and aggressively 🙂 you'll find it's far better received.
Why is that a bad thing? They have managed to protect high living standards and public services despite no growth. Steady state is where it's at now.
and look at what happened to their property values.
this government will do everything it can to manage a soft landing for U.K. house prices and not have a massive fall like other countries.
high interest rates and defaults on mortgages would really bring this country to it's knees, the only reason we are not heading to armageddon is the ability to print money, some would argue that's just delaying the inevitable.
Its one of those subjects that absolutely boils my piss though. Sorry 😈
I've taken my valium now molly 😀
and look at what happened to their property values.
Secondary importance. And lower property prices would benefit a great many people in this country.
Secondary importance. And lower property prices would benefit a great many people in this country.
Yes but politics wont allow it though. it would also put a lot of people in financial trouble (more than there are already) be interesting to see how the housing benefit caps have a knock on effect to the 'property portfolios' of private landlords that are effectively being subsidised by taxpayers money through housing benefit payments.
lets not forget the high personal debt levels in this country
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so they could go on the piss for 3/4 years...
The only students who are bigger pissheads than process engineers are doctors!
Any recovery is going to be slow simply because they are trying to manage the shit out of it.
Modern recessions are always going to be slow to get out of, now that everything is micro managed.
Letting it sort itself out would result in a much quicker recovery at the expense of social upheaval and mass poverty.
No one with an ounce of compassion wants to go there so we're left with a very slow economy regardless of which way they try to do it.
IMHO it's £90K poorly spent
90k on a trade show where customers come to you is infinitely preferable to 90k on six months on the road going to them.
ransos - MemberJapan experienced a 'lost decade' of no/very weak growth not so long ago.
Why is that a bad thing? They have managed to protect high living standards and public services despite no growth. Steady state is where it's at now.
Japan has the highest debt as a % of GDP in the developed world, is sat on a demographic timebomb and will also face its own debt crisis in the not too distant future when investors decide that earning 1% or less on Japanese government bonds is a bum deal.
They have tried all sorts of monetary and fiscal stimulus to try and inject some inflation and growth into their economy and all they have ended up with is a huge pile of debt.
Britain is not in a recession, Britain is in a RETAIL recession. Manufacturers are absolutely mad busy and you can't get seats on flights to business destinations because British exporters are travelling like never before. Traffic is back to 2009 levels. The government is measuring the economy through retail so getting a gloomy picture, meanwhile everybody is buying their goods off the web and traditional retail figures are not picking them up.
Yip - the economic powers-that-be in Europe have a fantastic track record of effectively and efficiently investing for the future, don't they?
Post WWII about 30-40 years of growth was based on borrowing.
The only students who are bigger pissheads than process engineers are doctors!
Oi, we lived nest door to a house of doc's, and we definately drank more!
Japan has the highest debt as a % of GDP in the developed world, is sat on a demographic timebomb and will also face its own debt crisis in the not too distant future when investors decide that earning 1% or less on Japanese government bonds is a bum deal.They have tried all sorts of monetary and fiscal stimulus to try and inject some inflation and growth into their economy and all they have ended up with is a huge pile of debt.
Hungarian is going to be the next country to seek a bail out.
So your friends did worthwhile degrees & not Dog grooming & flower arranging so they could go on the piss for 3/4 years...
Ah, so 'media studies' degrees (which I assume you are referring to) aren't worthwhile then?
Interesting that you say that, on an internet forum.
To counter that, everyone I know who graduated with an engineering degree is either employed and earning very good money or made a decison after being made redundant to go traveling instead and hasn't come back! One guy in my class got lucky and is is practicaly semi-retired at 27 living in Cornwall and doing consulting work and surfing in aproximately equal measure!But then 'editorial' sounds like media studies to me.
Some of the wealthiest, most successful and happiest people I know graduated in 'media studies'. These are some of the people who now run the media that you consume, such as newspapers, TV, film, journalism, publishing etc. These people are really quite a lot more influential in your life than you might actually realise. It's easy to dismiss something you have little knowledge of.
Truth is that we need people with a borad spectrum of abilities and interests, in order for society to flourish in a positive manner. We need our artists, poets, musicians etc as much as we need our engineers. have a look at how much money the creative industries generate. Have a look at just how influenetial our media industries are; many of them set the standard the rest of the world follows. Whilst some of our engineering is top class, the rest of the worlds is catching up and overtaking us (remeber when British made products used to be the very best? Now if you want something to work, you're often better off buying foreign products). Yet our creative industries are still producing world-beating products. I fear that a lower uptake of 'media studies' degrees could well lead to cultural stagnation and the demise of Britain's position at the top of that tree.
Give your child both a spanner and a paintbrush. Let them choose which tool they are more comfortable with.
Manufacturers are absolutely mad busy and you can't get seats on flights to business destinations because British exporters are travelling like never before.
This is true, trying to book flights to Poland, Austria, Denmark etc from Manchester is a nightmare at the moment, every commuter filght i'm on is absolutely packed!
On the plus side it means i'm flying via places like Frankfurt and Berlin bringing me much closer to my SAS gold card 😀
Flight to Vienna 2 weeks ago, booked last minute was over £400, one way!
It's better than pre-2008 surely - totally ignoring the obvious unsustainability of how we were living
Plenty of people knew we were heading for a storm but either kept their mouths shut because they were creaming it or shouted down by those that were creaming it.
We've learnt a very valuable lesson about debt and credit and 'wealth' that I think earlier generations (pre Baby Boomers) fully understood but has been forgotten or possibly never known by younger generations.
Once we've learnt that globalisation has changed our relative wealth and settled into a more financially sustainable situation I think we'll be far better off, morally and financially...
I think a few more Brits need to visit some third world or Arab countries and realise that relatively, in economic wealth and political freedom we're still one of the richest countries in the world
And it'll happen again in 3 generations time when those who haven't lived through what we're living through are making the decisions...
Give your child both a spanner and a paintbrush. Let them choose which tool they are more comfortable with.
Or a computer 🙂
Japan has the highest debt as a % of GDP in the developed world, is sat on a demographic timebomb and will also face its own debt crisis in the not too distant future when investors decide that earning 1% or less on Japanese government bonds is a bum deal.
Japan also has low unemployment, low inequality, low crime, high literacy & numeracy, high life expectancy and universal healthcare. I'm not arguing it's all rosy, but I am arguing that they've managed to protect the things that do the most good for most people.
The world has changed, and we need to change with it. Just as the post-war consensus ended, so has laissez-faire capitalism. I'm saying to you that looking for continual economic growth as the answer is a dead end.
Things are going to get much worse, the impact of the spending cuts hasn't been fully felt yet. Double/triple dip is irrelevant, really it's been one long period of economic contraction.
Paying back debt is painful, we all borrowed too much (people, companies, governments)
@brooess makes some very good points
hora - MemberAnd worst of all, the East Europeans are moving back home, so even if the building trades were healthy, the quality of workmanship will drop dramatically and entire buildings will collapse.
When I was having quotes for building work 3 Polish lads came round, stayed a fair while and gave me by far the highest price of the lot.
I went with one of the lower ones. The final price came out higher than the Polish lads. The builders actually struggled, figuring out along the way that this actually needed doing (it did) and that (it did). Exactly everything that the Poles said.
hmm... not agrreing with you on that one, Hora....
had a job in shop fitting job in Poland a few months back. why didn't they use Polish guys? because it was a Japanese company and they wanted "German" quality.
on the way there we stayed in a newly finished hotel. the materials used were good quality, the workmanship less so:
[img][url= http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8068/8190902994_1868f752af.jp g" target="_blank">
[img][url= http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8337/8189820545_b5ccc85e81.jp g" target="_blank">
[img][url= http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8484/8189820615_c9f9d28745.jp g" target="_blank">
the tools are in the room as we asked the (admittedly lovely receptionist) whether the van & tools were safe over night. "no" she said despite the van being parked in their locked carpark.... 😕
Trouble is we were a skilled workforce. Past tense. Those skills are disappearing as nobody has trained anyone, or gone completely. We are reaping the whirlwind of terminally short-sighted decision making by companies looking exclusively at short term dividends to greedy shareholders
You might not be the 'go to' man for Middle Eastern affairs, but I can't fault your logic here. The hard, unpalatable truth is that wer'e actually no longer very good at many of the things we used to be very good at. And we're not making any effort to become good at them again, probably because they demand hard work, dedication and commitment. Things which many people don't want to do, because it's easier to buy 'success' on credit.
double post madness.
Oh God. Me and Mike seem to be in complete agreement again. What on earths going on?
My sister works in media in London, with a lot of people with those supposedly useless degrees. The media company she works for is mad busy. The majority of the clients are all over the world. She's always traveling. Examples: Ikea and Renault are a couple of hers. Creative industries like this are responsible for a huge chunk of our exports. Have you seen what a London advertising agency charges for a worldwide product launch, for example? We're talking eye-watering sums of money here!
And foreign companies use British creative agencies, and are happy to spend those sums of money, for one very simple reason. That they're the very best in the world! By a significant margin!
new mother in law set up a book design business about a year ago with a friend and she's bringing in nearly 350k for the first year... with work booked up for the next 2-3 years already. creative industry, clients from all over europe and america
Mike - here's an example. From my ex-wifes bitter experience. Christy towels, formally base in Hyde, in Manchester. They were bought out by an Indian company, who shut down their UK manufacturing and moved it to India. The result - over 100 years of expertise - people who'd worked doing that all their lives, was lost. They were all thrown onto the dole.
Turns out the company was only after the 'Brand'. Meanwhile over in India, the manufacturing, staffed by unskilled, poorly paid workers can get nowhere near to achieving the quality that their main clients - Marks and Spencers, John Lewis etc demand (and received for years!). so container-load, after container-load of Indian made towels are rejected and sent back to India, or sold cheap to discounters.
Until, of course, the companies lose patience and cancel their contract. Choosing to have them made in Turkey instead. They couldn't have chosen to go to a British supplier as there are none left. Despite a pool of people who are experts at this all languishing on the dole, or stacking shelves in Tesco. Those skills are now permanently lost to our economy. Once they're gone, they're gone
The Christy manufacturing site has, somewhat predictably, been sold to be developed as flats
Its all pretty depressing
I never realised you married for money 😉
profit or turnover? If we're having a pissing contest then let's set out the ground rules.350k
I can't say I'm sorry to see some of the Eastern Europeans (Poles) going back, very bad experiences round our way with poor workmanship, massive cost overruns, ignorance (or just ignoring) building regs. I have never used them. I don't appreciate them claiming child benefit wither for their families back home. By all means come here with skills and settle but a very large portion brought none and just exported their earnings back home.
Its all pretty depressing
Hmm.. but do people in the UK actually want work making paper towels? Are there other more interesting jobs to do?
60 years ago most of us were employed putting things in machines or pulling levers, weren't we?
My dad, with similar skills and aptitude to me, started as a mining electrician. He hated it, and thank F I didn't have to do that shit.
Hmm.. but do people in the UK actually want work making paper towels?
No. I'm sure they'd rather be on the dole or stacking shelves. And its textiles. Remember: the industry that created so much of this countries wealth.
The manufacturing facility was state-of-the-art. Kitted out only 2 years before the business was sold. The millions of pounds worth of equipment were shipped out to India. where apparently it was run into the ground. While in England, it had been maintained by a team of skilled engineers. One of the multitude of skilled people also employed, but no longer, [i]making paper towels[/i] 🙄
step mother, not mother in law! my mistake
and yeah thats net profit after taking away all the start up costs, new equipment, expanding their offices to include a new meeting room and storage for a new venture they want to play with. not sure i want a pissing contest though, dont remember asking for one... was just supporting the idea that creative industries are pretty strong from the UK...
Hmm.. but do people in the UK actually want work making paper towels? Are there other more interesting jobs to do?
I think a great many people [me included] don't want to work at all, interesting or not.
Want is not the deciding factor
paper towels?
of course there are other, more interesting jobs to do, but not everyone can be a lawyer, ballet dancer or "pop star". we need people doing menial jobs. people doing menial jobs need jobs.
if these people are unable to find work making towels, a job that they have been doing all their lives then they are going to find it hard getting a job as say.... a [s]computer nerd[/s] IT specialist. 😉
but do people in the UK actually want work making paper towels?
Very few of us really want to do the job we actually do hence why our employers are forced to pay us to be there
HTH
with 2.6 million people (officially) unemployed, I doubt they'd have much of a problem filling even such a thoroughly demeaning position
we need people doing menial jobs. people doing menial jobs need jobs.
Playing devils advocate, here's a talking point
[b]IF[/b]
dole + foreign wage + shipping + etc < UK minimum wage then it's cheeper for the rest of the country to pay NI to suppourt the dole and buy their toilet paper from India.
we need people doing menial jobs
In the short term, of course.
However is having the working classes slaving away doing menial work something our economy should aspire to in the long run?
There seems to be a lot of cultural output devoted to discussing being trapped in dead end jobs in dead end towns.
is 'care' a menial job... its definitely hands on, wiping bums, cleaning up sick and so forth, we'll need more and more people working in care as the ageing population keeps being kept alive despite being well past their use-by-date!
However is having the working classes slaving away doing menial work something our economy should aspire to in the long run?
Aspiration is a luxury you can afford once you've taken care of necessity.
Oh, and Christy... [url= http://www.christy-towels.com/t-bathroom.aspx ]not paper towels or toilet roll[/url]