There is a big poster at the end of my road, that is trying to recruit drivers, with a starting bonus, and reasonable hours and conditions.
So all the drivers leaving the industry seem to have at least got their point across to someone.
It is not the UK only, here in Italy there was an entrepreneur (in logistics/transports) who was not finding drivers that pointed out how (for a number of reasons, possibly all of them right) to get nowadays a truck driving license (for TIRs) is very costly (both in terms of time and of money, if I recall correctly something like 6,000-10,000 Euro) and there was the issue on how he could pay in advance the costs but there was apparently no legal way to recover them (by keeping a part of the monthly pay of the worker over a "fair" period, I seem to remember 2 years), as it had happened to him that as soon as the candidate drivers would get the driving license they would resign and find work in another company.
In the UK I believe part of the problem is/was Brexit because a number of drivers were from eastern EU and they didn't want or could not obtain residence/work permit/whatever needed to continue working in the UK, here (where there is not such a problem for workers from the EU) the lack of them is mainly "concurrent retirement" of a whole generation born between roughly 1955 and 1965 and the initial "access cost" to get the driving license for the young people that may want to start the job.
> It is not the UK only, here in Italy there was an entrepreneur (in logistics/transports) who was not finding drivers that pointed out how (for a number of reasons, possibly all of them right) to get nowadays a truck driving license (for TIRs) is very costly (both in terms of time and of money, if I recall correctly something like 6,000-10,000 Euro) and there was the issue on how he could pay in advance the costs but there was apparently no legal way to recover them (by keeping a part of the monthly pay of the worker over a "fair" period, I seem to remember 2 years), as it had happened to him that as soon as the candidate drivers would get the driving license they would resign and find work in another company.
This is peak Italian entrepreneurship. This guy invested some money in training and then went on TV to play the martyr because he can’t retain employees. Instead of doing the right and most obvious thing, that is paying market salaries, he complaints that indentured labor is no longer legal.
I didn't see him on TV, I read an article on a newspaper about the issue, I dont' think that there was anyone playing martyr, nor any intention for indentured labor or similar, it was - as I read it at the time - simply a rant about the scarcity of qualified drivers and the difficulties in hiring new workers (unqualified) and assist them in getting the license, as doing that would become a too large investment for the firm, and asked (this is actually italian entrpreneurship) for some form of assistance by the state.
At least in the interview he stated that the people would be paid the national contract wage, roughly 3,000 Euro/month net, which is "market salary".
Here is the online article (the one on the actual newspaper was longer and more detailed AFAICR):
In the article it says that he’s not going to pay for the driving license, so the part where he says he’d like to keep the worker for 2 years is missing (I was referring to that as indentured labor).
Said that, if you can’t find workers, you are not paying the market clearing salary. Maybe now you have to offer 4K€ for 4 days of work.
Proposing that the state pays for these licences is not that insane, it may address a market failure. Many countries, Italy included, have similar programs to help the unemployed find a job.
>Said that, if you can’t find workers, you are not paying the market clearing salary. Maybe now you have to offer 4K€ for 4 days of work.
Yes, and 5K€ would be even better, too bad that on the other side (the firm income) prices are de facto capped, so it is not possible to pay more the workers, margins in this field are really thin.
And 3K€/month net is already a rather high salary in Italy.
>Proposing that the state pays for these licences is not that insane, it may address a market failure. Many countries, Italy included, have similar programs to help the unemployed find a job.
Cannot say how much they are effective in other countries, but I can tell you that in Italy these programs in practice rarely succeed in making even a dent in unemployment numbers, for a number of reasons.
> Yes, and 5K€ would be even better, too bad that on the other side (the firm income) prices are de facto capped, so it is not possible to pay more the workers, margins in this field are really thin.
I'm just saying that if you really need employees and you can't hire them for 3K and, for whatever reason, you can't hire more junior workers and train them, the only option you have left is increasing salaries.
> Cannot say how much they are effective in other countries, but I can tell you that in Italy these programs in practice rarely succeed in making even a dent in unemployment numbers, for a number of reasons.
In Italy these programs don't succeed because the Italian conceives only 5 professions: the priest, the mayor, the notary, the doctor and the lawyer. Everybody else is an "employee" (if you ask some Italians in Italy what they do for a living, half of them will reply "impiegato", which means "employee") that could be replaced by the first rando walking through the door. So when you go to the employment office ("ufficio di collocamento" in Italian, "job center" in the UK), you are offered random courses that are not related to anything you have ever done or studied, because, if you are not a priest or the mayor, then you could be writing software or driving trucks or making pizzas and nobody would know the difference. A friend of mine, after losing his job as a network administrator, was sent to a pizzaiolo course, then he was half-trained as a fire fighter, after that he did something related to shoemaking and finally he decided to move to his mother's village where he can live with 200 euros a month. Needless to say, he still can't make pizzas or climb ladders.
In the past I've worked in a training center in Italy. The courses where quite expensive by the Italian standards (5-6K for 6 months), but all students received a grant from the local municipality or the region that paid the full tuition fee (for reasons that I won't explain, the tuition fee matched the grant exactly). Almost all students found a job within a few months, that in Italy is an exceptional phenomenon. So the system may work. I concede that our students were selected and that the human material that attends a programming or a networking course is not the same that would attend truck driving training.
People working in labs today must be speeding up nature significantly on a daily basis.
Perform lots of concurrent experiments, apply different environmental stresses, provide different nutrition, cross different variants you find useful, automate all the processes and tests.
I think the project referenced seems to be deliberately not doing that, to observe the natural speed of change.
The other problem with "Public companies are inherently evil by default" is that saying that "the whole system is wrong", is just providing leaders with an excuse.
Public Companies can serve their customers, shareholders, and look after their employees while still being ethical, there is always a choice, and there are many positive benefits to behaving ethically, for one, it means you are a trustworthy company to deal with.
If you know that the system is broken and it is setup in a way that rewards bad behavior, what do you think is the best course of action: to expect that exceptional individuals will be always in charge to avoid the mistakes, or to fix the system so that even normal, fallible humans can be at helm and not having everyone else worried about potential abuses?
I don't see why not. Normal humans make mistakes, can't manually manage memory safely, are bad at building safe buildings without experience and standards and guidelines, and naturally fall into unsafe food preparation habits.
Still, we have set up memory safe practices and languages and standards, building standards and regulations, and food safety regulations that work quite well. Just because humans make mistakes and are fallible doesn't mean that humans are incapable of working to prevent mistakes and the consequences of human fallibility.
I'm not suggesting we shouldn't have rules and laws and whatnot. It sounded like the person I was responding to thought it would be a silver bullet. I was trying to push back saying it wouldn't be perfect. We can improve things, but since the rule makers are also fallible there will always be loopholes and other issues.
If normal people (shareholders, c levels, etc) are going to engage in bad behavior then why do you think other normal people (lawmakers) are not? If lawmakers are going to be rewarded from bad behavior then we can't fix the rules / laws.
I'm not suggesting we shouldn't try, but it isn't really silver bullet.
This is why I said about institutions. Lawmakers are (or should be) subject to public scrutiny.
An employee from a corporation benefits from a corporation that abuses their power. Ordinary citizens that vote for a corrupt politician do not, and have no invested interest in them.
I agree, but until something comes to light abuses could still be happening. I was mostly pushing back on the idea that a system can be created that would allow the average person to not pay attention. I think individuals must be vigilant even if we think we have a good system.
"Not worrying about it" is not "not paying attention", maybe that is the point that you assumed more than I intended to convey with my comment.
It's less about matter of eliminating abuse, and more about damage reduction. We can have systems that even if someone screws up, the consequences are not catastrophic.
Waiting longer is ok, it is waiting a random time in a unplanned way with a missed date that is very annoying and becomes expensive, not keeping to schedule will make consumers look elsewhere.
We can clearly see that the current generation of tank the Russians have are useless.
We will spend lots of money on very expensive equally redundant tanks.
We can clearly see that the Russians were unable to gain air superiority.
We will spend lots of money on incredibly expensive new fighters and bombers.
We can clearly see the Russian fleet is bottled up.
We will spend lots of money on new ships and submarines.
If we were interested in defence, all the (small) spending would be on anti tank and anti aircraft missile systems, logistics, and training our national guard, firemen, police and other citizens.
We (the west) vastly outnumber the Russians, have more advanced technology, and hugely larger industrial capacity.
This defence spending is obviously not about Russia, and not about defence, it is firstly and mainly about making money and creating jobs to get ourselves out of the current economic disaster, and secondly about preparing for war with our next official adversary, whoever the Americans decide to nominate for that.
I think you underestimate just how low EU military spending was. In Germany there were reports of a complete lack of readiness: in 2018 DW reported that none of Germany's 14 large military transports were flight-worthy, 21,000 officer positions were vacant, fighter aircraft were averaging 4 months of flyability per year (resulting in a pilot training deficit), and only 9 of 44 tanks promised for the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force were operational. And those are the big flashy items. The articles also note shortages of supplies like winter clothes, automatic grenade launchers, night-vision equipment, and body armor.
The German defense budget was 46.5 bln € in 2021 [1]. The problem is not spending, the problem is the utter mismanagement in the defense ministry and military forces. I have talked to someone who did contract work for the ministry and knows their internal processes. He proposed that the first step should be to fire everyone and restaff the ministry from scratch.
True, but presumably EU pays its soldiers EU wages and buys modern technology which has been tested for safety and reliability, whereas Russia sends conscripts to war in austere equipment.
> We can clearly see that the current generation of tank the Russians have are useless.
You deeply underestimate how much worse things could get.
After receiving tens of thousands of ATGMs, Ukraine still only destroyed a fraction of the current russian armor and equipment. Russia has many times over in storage. Sure, it will take a while to make that operational, but we shouldn't be taking any chances and just build overwhelming force to stop Russia, especially when it's so cheap for us, relatively speaking.
There are some estimates that 25% (500 of 2000) of all tanks involved in the invasion were destroyed. That's certainly a fraction but a rather large one.
Especially annoying when reams of nonsense also gets 'unexpectedly' sprayed into the web browser of some poor sod using an enterprise app, just because Java is having a bad day. This seems to happen less than it used to a few years ago, so there is some progress going in in software engineering, somewhere.
Interestingly it is the base M1 that is still the most interesting device, lower cost, lower heat, good single core performance, capable of most tasks, and reasonable graphics for a lower power device.
Other fast laptops are all about the heat and the fan noise (my tiny work laptop is the loudest device in my room)
A number of times I have got off the train with a laptop almost on fire in my bag, because windows failed to notice the laptop lid was closed.
Ill be getting the M1 laptop next time I need one.
Reading is a great deal faster than watching videos.
Presumably doubling the speed must also make the presenters sound like chipmunks or voles or something. Perhaps just fiddling with the sound frequency also works.
There is something different or odd about it though.
I don't think anyone is arguing that the low number of Women in tech is not a problem, understanding the root cause is presumably important or we will continue to miss out on a significant talent pool.
I am not a rust fan, but `ever` is a long time, and if operating systems are re-written in rust (which is preferable by far than writing them in C), that is going to be a lot of very widely used code.
