Wow, keep it coming, you looking great…

Oh..how’s that then?

# Bless you troll, bless you.#

Who are you now?… the fuckin Pope? If so…never mind the benedictions matey…let loose with the apologies. Never done one before? I’ll give you a couple of tips:

a) include an acknowledgement that you were entirely wrong.

b) make a clear statement that you will try and stop getting hysterical and throwing slanderous comments about.

c) try and stop being a dick.

Do you think about what you’re typing? Are you completely unaware of your own actions? Read the whole thread. Read who ‘came back to attack someone’.

And where’s my fuckin apology btw?

#Glad you care but really, you ain’t got a thing on me#

No can’t place it…er?..Jay Z?..Emimem?…why are you so fuckin saturated in popular American culture Danny boy?..you wanna make it big in Vegas?

Glad you care but really, you ain’t got a thing on me.

er..what was it you were saying? Oh yeah: “In your dreams darling, keep it coming though.”

right…here goes..you smell

Really?…so why are the veins on your forehead close to rupturing?

Seriously, that can’t be all you got?”

Nope…can’t place that one..I’ll say…either…something by Tarrantino or the porn you’ve just been watching?

Seriously, that can’t be all you got?

er…Daniel..might I refer you to this…”you can have the last word and hopefully it’ll keep you warm at night.”

I thought I was getting the last word..and yet you chose to try and steal it…do you actually ‘mean’ anything which you say?..on top of the self-absorption, delusion and poor syntax…are you an inveterate liar as well?

This is all I have to say….don’t reply and make a liar of yourself…again…unless you intend to give me the apology I’m still waiting for…that would be quite alright..if long overdue.

It’s my ball…and you’re not playing…let me guess: you weren’t too popular as a kid?..bit of a mummy’s boy?…got teased by the big, bad boys? Lots of latent anger?
Sort yourself out eh Dan Dan?

“Bye now, my job is done”..er what job?

“although no doubt you’ll have to try and come back”…try?…all I do is type something and press “Submit Comment”..really, it’s no trouble…there’s no ‘try’ about it

“ha, don’t worry bitch, you can have the last word and hopefully it’ll keep you warm at night.”

I leave this to speak for itself…bad boy, Daniel…and just when I thought you were getting better. Btw..what happened to the apology you owe me for accusing me of impersonating you?..presumably your in-depth IP investigation unit has cleared me by now? Did you ever discover who the culprit was?

Bye now, my job is done, although no doubt you’ll have to try and come back…ha, don’t worry bitch, you can have the last word and hopefully it’ll keep you warm at night.

w00t#

Oh joy, the Liberal poodle is back to snipe and point out that I’m offering nothing.

w00t

If there is one thing more pointless than offering nothing, it’s going to the trouble of writing a post which draws attention to the fact that another post offers nothing. You cognitively-deficient buffoon.

I don’t think it’s quite as straight forward as that.

The A-levels needed for university places to read engineering are much the same as for physics, astronomy etc but engineering departments found it challenging to attract the best – and that as well as declining numbers over a long period of A-level candidates taking physics and maths.

The problems are therefore more complex than just the sentiments of Tory landowners and middle class lefties. Listen to undergrads and they often explain away uncouth behaviour in student bars by saying the culprits were engineering students. There are entrenched expectations about how engineering students tend to behave.

Another part of the equation is that financial institutions have been able to attract graduates with strong maths skills by offering huge salaries. I recall noting a couple of decades back the recruitment of theoretical nuclear physicists away from research posts at esteemed universities for jobs modelling financial markets – “rocket science”, in city jargon. And recall that manufacturing in Britain – the natural working environment for many mechanical and electrical engineers – has long had a downbeat reputation, partly because of the endemic industrial relations problems and perhaps also because of this as well:

“Up to 12 million working UK adults have the literacy skills expected of a primary school child, the [HoC] Public Accounts Committee says. . . The report says there are up 12 million people holding down jobs with literacy skills and up to 16 million with numeracy skills at the level expected of children leaving primary school.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4642396.stm

In all, for those with the aptitudes and computational skills to become engineers, there are other more attractive working environments which pay better or as well.

But none of this explains why Osborne would want to team up with Jeffrey Sachs, the leading advocate of shock therapy for Russia in the early 1990s.

Those with insider knowledge of academia know that university engineering departments, at least for most of the time since WW2, have found it challenging to attract the quality of applicants that physics, astronomy or, latterly, computer sciences departments could attract and with all requiring much the same subjects at A-level. For reasons no one fully understands, reading engineering at uni is not well regarded by school leavers. This could partly be because undergrads tend to look down on engineering students – believe me, ask undergrad students.

As for China, some observers have remarked that ethnic Chinese are among the most entrepreneurial people on earth. Reportedly, one of the factors that motivated Deng Xiaoping to make that epoch changing remark about cats catching mouse is that he came to notice the huge differences in living standards between the Chinese living in China and the overseas Chinese. But don’t think I’m holding up Deng as a paragon – he wasn’t. As a retired supreme leader, in 1989 he was consulted about Tiananmen Square and gave the nod to what happened there.

Regarding Jeffrey Sachs’ shock therapy for Russia in the early 1990s and its consequences, we can also see that the China’s government is being immensely more successful in promoting a transition to market capitalism. Occasionally, I browse in my local PC World and note how many products of Japanese electronics companies are manufactured in China.

The Dissenting acadmies set up the Non-Conformists from the end of the 17 Century seem to have fizzled out by the mid 19 C. Many of the industrialists of the 18 and early 19 were educated in these academies in which science , mathematics, modern languages and book keeping were taught.

The Soviet Union was a empire which broke up: China is a country dominated by the Han with minorities. Historically Russia has had very little business expertise, perhaps St Petersberg and the Crimea. China has experienced 32 yrs less of commmunism and there is still a part of the populace with entrepreneurial expertise: where this is lacking, it has been absorbed from Hong Kong( largely Cantonese). The Cantonese and Shanghainese have thousands of years of business expertise. In Singapore, Malaysia, Phillipines and Indonesia there are large Chinese business communities, largely Cantonese.

His failure to do that and his selection of Jeffrey Sachs can only mean that he regards the IFS as weaseling out of “tough choices” and believes that we really need Sachs’ shock therapy.

Which is, as set out above, floating the currency, selling off nationalised industries, abolishing price controls and liberalising trade. You’re being a touch hysterical about this. Jeffrey Sachs is not proposing to float the pound, people might laugh.

After all, Osborne could have invoked the the Green Budget of the IFS

The Tories have invoked the IFS repeatedly. However, I doubt whether the IFS would agree to a co-authored piece for the FT, given that they are scrupulously neutral in party politics.

C’mon. Why exactly did Osborne choose to team up with Jeffrey Sachs, when there are plenty of other economists around even if the signatories of the letters to the Sunday Times and Financial Times aren’t volunteering support for his draconian fiscal prescriptions?

After all, Osborne could have invoked the the Green Budget of the IFS:

“Whoever forms the Government after the forthcoming general election should put in place a fiscal tightening more ambitious over the next Parliament than that set out in the Pre-Budget Report (PBR), but without putting the recovery at undue risk with significant extra tax increases or public spending cuts in the coming year . . . ”
http://www.ifs.org.uk/pr/gb2010pr.pdf

The full IFS Green Budget for 2010 is here:
http://www.ifs.org.uk/budgets/gb2010/gb2010.pdf

His failure to do that and his selection of Jeffrey Sachs can only mean that he regards the IFS as weaseling out of “tough choices” and believes that we really need Sachs’ shock therapy.

Of course, a charitable and credible alternative explanation is that Osborne really doesn’t understand what he is doing.

Britain’s industrial progress through the 19th century was achieved through free-trade and a mostly laissez-faire policy regime at home, albeit diminishingly so as Parliaments came to better appreciate the pitfalls of unbridled markets. Not so the industrial development of the US (with trade barriers) or Germany (with trade barriers and state intervention).

Increasingly, the failings of Britain’s schooling system, run by charities and the churches, became evident:

“We have noted a substantial body of original research . . . which found that stagnant or declining literacy underlay the ‘revolution’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . . Britain in 1850 was the wealthiest country in the world but only in the second rank as regards literacy levels. [Nick] Crafts has shown that in 1870 when Britain was world economic leader, its school enrolment ratio was only 0.168 compared with the European norm of 0.514 and ‘Britain persistently had a relatively low rate of accumulation of human capital’.”
Sanderson: Education, economic change and society in 1780-1870 (Cambridge UP, 1995) p.61

As technology became more complex, the need for a better schooled workforce became apparent so Parliament passed the 1870 education act to ensure all had access to a basic primary education.

“Kuznets observed in 1963 that innovation at any given time tends to concentrate in a small sector of industries and countries and argued that such differences help to determine differences in rates of economic growth across countries. Economic history supports these claims: Germany’s focus on chemical innovations is widely understood to have enabled Germany to replace Britain as the industrial leader in the late 19th-century. Edwin Rothbarth (1946), H.J. Habakkuk (1962) and Rosenberg (1972) argue that America’s growth rates overtook Europe’s at the beginning of the 20th century because American innovations focused on labor-saving innovations in machinery.”
http://web.mit.edu/moser/www/pat501.pdf