Engineer, Inventor, Dad, STEM Educator, Philosopher, Stoic, Youth First Advocate | Opinions are my own. "You can never have too many drill bits."
Earth (b4 the next asteroid)
Joined May 2017
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Engineer since I was knee high. Invented motorised plank of wood aged 8 with spare RC motors, a whole lot of D cells, WD40 and duct tape. Often found randomly bringing stuff together to make inanimate objects move. Occasionally also do the same with people, reluctantly.
Engineering Dad 🔧🌍🇯🇪 retweeted
Capital is not a free gift of nature. Someone had to forgo consumption, raise funds, and risk bankruptcy so that workers could have tools, factories, and payroll. Calling that person a non-contributor is like saying the farmer does not grow food because the rain falls.
I was thinking this exact thing just a few hours ago. We're redoing sections of woodland and streams, clearing, replanting, rebuilding. Stuff that won't be enjoyed properly until I'm gone. I'm doing this not to enjoy it, but because it needs doing for tomorrow's people.
Engineering Dad 🔧🌍🇯🇪 retweeted
Bring back conscription is a terribly intellectually bankrupt authoritarian idea so was OSA, tobacco prohibition and the response to Covid. Sunak is an establishment failure and should be treated as one.
Some political ideas age better than others.
When I proposed a new model of national service in the 2024 election, it quickly became the butt of jokes. Now France and Germany are taking steps towards it, and in Sweden places are highly prized by teenagers and employers alike.
What I’d seen as prime minister – the constant probing by our enemies, which didn’t distinguish between civilian and military – had convinced me we would soon need some kind of resilience corps. The cyberattacks on European supermarkets, with fridges remotely set to 50C so the food spoils, show this is our new reality. Defence spending won’t stop that. Responsibility for our security can’t just be subcontracted to the military.
In a world in which the government feels obliged to tell us to stockpile tinned goods, our culture needs to change. It will take more than well-stocked cupboards to meet this moment.
A new, universal national service scheme should offer people options. A few might join a small, selective military cadre. Others could serve with search and rescue, St John Ambulance or Meals on Wheels, or train in cybersecurity.
It would make us more resilient and more cohesive, give the almost one million young people not in education, employment or training a sense of purpose, and remind us all that citizenship brings responsibilities as well as rights.
My @thetimes column today 👇 thetimes.com/comment/columni…
Engineering Dad 🔧🌍🇯🇪 retweeted
Reducing taxes puts more money in people’s pockets. That allows them to afford more things.
Leftists have zero understanding of basic economics.
If it were 1776, they’d be British loyalists.
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Engineering Dad 🔧🌍🇯🇪 retweeted
>>>I keep seeing this breathtakingly retarded take⬇️
In a real free market, parties decide what information to reveal based on their own incentives
Information asymmetry is normal, not a distortion
When firms choose not to post exact salaries, it is often strategic:
🔹It preserves room to pay more for stronger candidates without immediately resetting everyone else’s expectations.
🔹It avoids anchoring low quality applicants who apply only because a range looks high
🔹It lets compensation vary by location, experience, performance signals, and total package (bonus, equity, flexibility)
The new government legislation overrides freedom of choice & is anti free market.
Engineering Dad 🔧🌍🇯🇪 retweeted
Translation:
Produce and buy me a house, feed me, and provide my healthcare at the expense of your time, effort, money, and choices, or you're selfish.
I shouldn't have to pay for anything, but you should have to pay for me.
And somehow, I'm the one who isn't greedy.
Engineering Dad 🔧🌍🇯🇪 retweeted
>>> Nope, nothing is stopping them from moving on & getting a job elsewhere.
In my world there would be no rNHS or state involvement in education & very few public sector workers anyway therefore the problem solves itself.
I hope that’s not too communist for you
Engineering Dad 🔧🌍🇯🇪 retweeted
Imagine paying good money to listen to any of these cranks.
It's like the who's who of political rejects.
Keir Starmer cashes in on lucrative speaking gigs after quitting No10 as he signs up with US-based agency which boasts Joe Biden, Jacinda Ardern and Kamala Harris among its clients trib.al/0yDweeL
Very much enjoying the discussion around whether printing salaries is a good thing. Lots of good points. The clear winner is that it seems people are annoyed about wasting time applying for jobs where value expectations are at odds. Here's a thing. You can always ask.
Engineering Dad 🔧🌍🇯🇪 retweeted
For anyone who's been paying attention for the last few years, we've been living in the post-truth age for a very long time.
The Energy Independence Bill is the complete opposite.
It's an Orwellian inversion of reality.
The latest from @RichardLyon_
September cost a record £553 million to keep Britain’s grid in balance. Most of it went on switching Scottish wind off and paying plants further south to stand in, and gas made half of all the extra power NESO bought.
This week’s Week in Energy: richardlyon.substack.com/p/t…
Engineering Dad 🔧🌍🇯🇪 retweeted
There were young people on the bus earlier.
The one thing I don't like about public transport?
The public.
The whole salary value thing is pointless. What will happen is that every job will be advertised as minimum wage. And people will just know there's headroom. So they'll apply anyway, and then when they get into the details, the real value will be established.
And of course, this will be fine, because fundamentally no one has lost and there's been no dishonesty, just standard practice in the exchange of value. So it won't save anyone any time and wages will still be the same.
Engineering Dad 🔧🌍🇯🇪 retweeted
There's no economic rationale for intermittent wind power which is why it's heavily subsidised. Wind also doesn't pay for its externalities in the shape of backup, extra balancing costs and the huge cost of extra, poorly utilised grid transmission lines. Economic basket case.
This of course is total bollocks. Anyone looking into a role without a figure in their head of their worth is crazy. You have no negotiating position with printed values and can't tell them how you're worth more. Jobs for the mediocre.
Anyone who's ever sat on the hiring side of a big company will quietly welcome the government's plan to force salary details into job adverts.
The reason is simple. When a large employer makes you an offer, that package was built on tens of thousands of pounds of compensation research bought from the big HR consultancies. They know the market inside out - what every role pays, how to grade it, how to price it. You, the candidate, have a few self-reported figures scraped from the internet, some accurate, some not. It's better than nothing, which is roughly what you had twenty years ago.
That asymmetry is the whole game. Compare it to interviewing, say, for a buyer role at Tesco while looking at a similar opening at Sainsbury's, knowing what both pay, and being able to negotiate properly when an offer lands. That's a different conversation entirely.
It's preposterous that employers have got away with hiding this for as long as they have. The UK is joining what looks like a Western trend towards pay transparency, and I fully support it. It'll be harder to lowball candidates who don't negotiate, easier for good candidates to choose between offers, and the talent pool gets allocated a more sensibly.
A welcome measure, plainly.
