Hello??

Old tin/lead solder can be cleaned of oxide by pulling the section you unroll to use through a pinched paper towel.

I have consulted on hourly pay. The oil&gas engineering industry uses the method so they can set-up staff for projects - which start, run, and complete. The folk go from project to project. You put in a time-sheet with your hours of work claiming payment. Sanctions against Russia starting 2014 put an end to that. Was the only "happening" place and we were barred by our own government. They were willing to make nuclear-powered drilling-rigs to operate in the Arctic. We abruptly severed from all that.

I have consulted on hourly pay. The oil&gas engineering industry uses the method so they can set-up staff for projects - which start, run, and complete. The folk go from project to project. You put in a time-sheet with your hours of work claiming payment. Sanctions against Russia starting 2014 put an end to that. Was the only "happening" place and we were barred by our own government. They were willing to make nuclear-powered drilling-rigs to operate in the Arctic. We abruptly severed from all that.

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After reaching our mid 50's I and others of my generation weren't welcome as full-time employees on the company health plan, so I worked as an hourly consultant.

Now they suffer the consequences of their actions.

I don't want to be "funny" or anything, but... Regarding the situation here in Britain, you don't even start to bring into focus the magnitude of the problem. That article

attributes it to a narrow "supply and demand mismatch". You don't get any inference of the massive mess-up in society which is the overall structure of what's gone wrong. I lack eloquence to do this, but I'll try.

"post-industrial" we have the "managerial class". Managing our services; managing what remains rightly. So that's new rulers "in town".

• liability and not being responsible for own actions v We can't train young people (in Britain you have to use "welding simulator" until you are "at least" 18 years of age - companies are finding young people with a welding qualification - there is no weld simple enough they can do it and get started)

• "unless it's a Degree it's not worth it" - "ahh you want to study - here is this much better 'structured, quality-assured, objective-defined, ... qualification' - in other words whatever it it is sitting in classrooms

• you work on a skill for years - you go to an interview and they ask you a "to objective criteria" series of "angels dancing on the head of a pin" questions - excludes any chance to discuss your ability for a job - more specifically; a device to exclude all reality

[my friend - she got a job - it's a technical job needing aptitude & experience - because about 5 deays before the then current incumbent left - with months gone by on "interview processes" they had to "set-aside all good procedure following the rules this time" and have the team leader chatting with anyone who showed interest in the job and selecting which one was in that team leader's opinion nett the best choice. My friend was "personning the fort" alone sometimes within a month of starting... The point is - this was forced on them - otherwise my friend would never have been recruited]

Etc. - keep on applying "sweeps of the same brush".

Look - you can all relate to this in the USA, where many of you are. The mistake of, whatever terms you apply (all pretty!) - going to war with Russia was mistaken in concept and in general a questionable idea... How did the US powers-that-be get it so wrong? Russia was supposed to collapse within about 3 weeks after "Pew-tin has made his final mistake" - and the Russia economy sailed on just fine - oil-tankers continued to sail; factories continued to produce; newspapers printed new; people went to work - all no discernable change. vvv In Langley, Virginia, if the way to get ahead and switch from barely making ends meet and having a 2 hour commute to work to a big office, good salary, residence in a desirable area a short commute to work is to

*>say what the boss wants to hear<* and that has gone on for a couple of generations - you are going to "press the magic button" and find your supreme economic weapon - your secret "nuclear option" (sic.) - isn't even seen by your opponent - you are in an empty room pressing a brightly coloured button with a lurid label but it is a "placebo" connected to nothing. You pick it up and find it's just got a flashlight-cell to make the button light-up - but that it and entirely it...

So - step back and see how big the whole non-function is...

In my opinion...

I don't want to be "funny" or anything, but... Regarding the situation here in Britain, you don't even start to bring into focus the magnitude of the problem. That article

attributes it to a narrow "supply and demand mismatch". You don't get any inference of the massive mess-up in society which is the overall structure of what's gone wrong. I lack eloquence to do this, but I'll try. ...

----------------------------------- I post here for practice to correct a severe deficiency of eloquence. I don't think in only one dimension but text has to be.

Usually I positioned myself to be where the actual work was, but when money dried up due to a recession or the yearly end>restart gap of the US budget process I saw people retreat into the survival positions you described while society coasted downhill on the dwindling surpluses of the past. My model is rats climbing over each other to be the last to drown when the ship sinks. I don't have the experience to write much about it because I purposely avoided the meetings and complications by remaining a technician (with overtime) while doing an engineer's design work. When the layoff came I cut firewood for free winter heat and caught up on neglected house and car maintenance.

I experienced the small company's lean efficiency of a "flatocracy", under stress the company might morph into the others for self-protection or because ageing or less productive engineers forced into management without training may not do as well with people as with things.

My father jumped from accountant to deputy commissioner and CFO of a state government agency. He took management classes and then tried to explain what he'd learned while I listened with apparent concern. My take-away was that I have no talent for or interest in joining management. I do try to at least learn something of what I know I'm not naturally good at.

Theatre provided exposure to a director's methods of management and motivation that I wouldn't see among independently self motivated scientists and engineers. The musical "A Chorus Line" is a good demonstration of the good cop/bad cop or carrot and stick approach.

• you work on a skill for years - you go to an interview and they ask you a "to objective criteria" series of "angels dancing on the head of a pin" questions - excludes any chance to discuss your ability for a job - more specifically; a device to exclude all reality

----------------------------------------- The HR person who should be prefiltering candidates before the experts interview them can only discuss what they understand, which is policies and procedures and maybe a vague misunderstanding of the actual job requirements, from someone perhaps good at doing but not explaining. For new product secrecy Segway fed the employment agency fanciful distractions instead of their real requirements. I might have studied ship block coefficients and hull speed if I'd taken them seriously. Actually I got that sort of detail from the extensive Titanic literature.

A liberal arts education teaches one to memorize and regurgitate the current set of accepted doctrine, it's no help to enter and explore the unknown of practical skills and new technology. My little bag of home machined tools and instrument parts jumped over the verbal communication hurdle.

Look - you can all relate to this in the USA, where many of you are. The mistake of, whatever terms you apply (all pretty!) - going to war with Russia was mistaken in concept and in general a questionable idea... How did the US powers-that-be get it so wrong? Russia was supposed to collapse within about 3 weeks after "Pew-tin has made his final mistake" - and the Russia economy sailed on just fine - oil-tankers continued to sail; factories continued to produce; newspapers printed new; people went to work - all no discernable change. vvv In Langley, Virginia, if the way to get ahead and switch from barely making ends meet and having a 2 hour commute to work to a big office, good salary, residence in a desirable area a short commute to work is to

*>say what the boss wants to hear<* and that has gone on for a couple of generations - you are going to "press the magic button" and find your supreme economic weapon - your secret "nuclear option" (sic.) - isn't even seen by your opponent - you are in an empty room pressing a brightly coloured button with a lurid label but it is a "placebo" connected to nothing. You pick it up and find it's just got a flashlight-cell to make the button light-up - but that it and entirely it...

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We certainly aren't immune from bureaucracy's tendency to make their own job security their main objective, and view the world through the selective filter of how it supports that goal. Not having possibly hostile and credible threats on our borders gives us an added luxury to view events as we want to instead of realistically.

This has been especially true of the party composed of labor lawyers who lack the skill to tie their shoelaces and argue like kindergarteners. In international relations they tend to assume that whatever they want will be the inevitable outcome and don't have a backup plan, like Obama's Line in the Sand, which turned out to be a yellow piddle trail marking our retreat. I don't claim that the other party is much better.

International power politics is a master class chess game clouded by random events where even the best gambits sometimes fail, the leadups to WW1 and WW2 being good examples. Trump isn't finished yet and shouldn't be judged too hastily on incomplete evidence.

I purposely rejected an invitation into the Intelligence business. An example of its politicized yes-man tendency is Curveball, the disgruntled Iraqi who made up the chemical weapons scenario based on a personal grudge and was amazed that we swallowed it so easily, mostly for lack of other timely evidence. We tend to leave Humint, spying, up to Britain or Israel as the better experts with more historical connections. Saddam himself mistakenly believed that the CIA would see through his bluster that was aimed at Iran, not us.

An example on your side is the German Nordpol operation in which they captured and turned nearly all the agents sent to Holland without raising British suspicion, even though an agent's code allowed telegraphing caughtcaughtcaught in the encrypted message to alert his handlers. You had done the same to their spies.