Posts by BenWilson
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A job in Yorkshire sounds better than my brief career in McDonalds.
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Does anybody know what happens to people who are 17 and a half and finished high school?
If American movies and TV are to be believed, they get laid.
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Fletcher, they certainly are arbitrary. There's no such thing as adulthood any more. There's a tortuous and gradual increase in rights and responsibilities. Making it even more tortuous and drawn out may seem like a progressive step, if your underlying assumption is that humans are becoming more childish. Unless you consider that the tortuous drawn-out-ness may actually be contributing to the increase in childishness.
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My biz partner dropped out during 7th form, aged 16. He was highly motivated and was doing fine at school but his reasons for leaving to begin work were all good:
1. He was from a poor family and needed the money
2. He was not learning anything that would help him in what he was 100% certain his choice of career direction was (computer programming).
3. He absolutely was not going to be going to varsity. He examined what they taught in various tech computer courses and realized he already knew all that shit.He is now a millionaire owner of a number of successful software products. I don't think holding him in school for another year and a half would have helped him one iota. It would have just prolonged the hardship which was the reality of his life at the time.
Thus I don't like the idea, and I'm not just thinking of kids who are underachieving in school. There are also a few people at the other end of the spectrum.
To me it's just a numbers fiddle to dick with unemployment figures. If people want to continue getting educated, they will. If they want to work, they should be allowed. It's only those who want neither that are a big problem. And I'm not that convinced the number of people like that really is that big a problem. If it is, it's a factor of the kind of work or schooling that they want not being available. Which is addressable without putting strictures on everyone else. Or they are the kind of people who just want to slack around. If so, they will slack around at school or in the workplace, whichever they are forced into. No real problem is solved by forcing them to do their slacking where they can maximize the disruption to non-slackers that they are causing, but a lot of problems are caused.
Our current solution for such slackers, to let them slack around on the meager pickings of welfare until they wise up, or indefinitely so long as they don't make trouble, actually works quite well. I don't buy into a direct connection between being a slacker and entering a life of crime. A life of crime beckons slackers and non-slackers alike, and is a mindset in itself which has always seemed to me to have little to do with simple laziness.
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Lyndon, indeed. The 'clips over the ear' that I got over the years ranged from a light tap to a punch that sent me sprawling. You can whack people pretty hard with an open hand, especially when you are twice their size.
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I stayed with extended family in Germany where they have had much older school leaving ages for a long time. I have to say it was bizarre to talk to a kid who was almost 20 but was still at school. It seemed like the system was denying him his adulthood. I was not that surprised when I found out last year he was running away with scientologists (who are all-but-banned in Germany). To take away the choice to just go out and get a job from people who are bigger and stronger than their teachers, and hate school too, felt very weird. I don't like the idea. To me our coming of age thresholds are all set way too high already.
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Am I the only one posting here who had to go and look up what 'X' actually is?
No, I'm just following the safe strategy of waiting for someone else to ask.
And it's never a total lie until somebody uses the word __synergy_...
LOL. Yes any presentation that has synergized should be thrown out.
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Craig, obviously most people are not in that particular demographic. But, philistine though I may be, I can see it's a hard path to follow. They probably appreciate government help a great deal more than most.
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Oh God, sorry for banging on about this but am I the only person who really wishes Clark would dump this applause line?
Can't see why she should. Creative people are still a voting demographic.
Although... that makes it rather difficult to get to the, erm, baby-making end of a shag...
If you need X you shouldn't be making babies.
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m'STOH, u beat me 2 it.
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