EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

There's a lot of opportunities if you know when to take them.

Did you make lots of money?

In that case, no.

Are those sorts of puns always on your mind?

The smell of tripe that gets into your clothes and will not go away sometimes made me wonder what I'd done to deserve this.

Started on very little money but got a pay rise after a while and was trusted enough by the boss to have the keys and so was left to my own devices to look after the animals on Sunday.

Forgive me, I tried not to do it. Turned over a new leaf, then tore right through it.

Sounds like you only wanted something else to do but hang around...

Presumably it was in the west end.

Got my first ‘real’ job at a climbing wall that way.

And people tell me I'm being boring when I do puns.

Heard something interesting this morning.

Chatting to a TNT/FedEx delivery driver in Harare (arranging a delivery there for work) and she mentioned that they're receiving "lots" (no idea what that actually means) of applications for delivery jobs from people who have returned to Zimbabwe after working delivery jobs in the UK.

Scathing:

https://twitter.com/alextaylornews/status/1443083587759362050?

If only there was a German word for "Glee at others' misfortune".

Thing is though, there isn't any gloating, they said this was going to happen and Olaf Scholz said it with a sort of weary disappointment a couple of days ago. Our neighbours are embarrassed on our behalf. Pity is much worse than scorn. And "Don't mention the B word" is completely accurate, the BBC are carefully avoiding mentioning it to absurd degrees. This is a national humiliation.

Well. I obviously don't support 'Brexit', but that commentary misses out a couple of important nuances. The subtitles are also poorly done, as they fail to convey the tone of the original and also contain numerous translation mistakes.

As we know, what 'Brexit' became was a significantly more radicalised version of what people originally thought it would be. With better planning, whatever contribution 'Brexit' made to the current shortages could have been avoided entirely. Instead, you had a succession of increasingly bone-headed idiots calling the shots, so far culminating in people completely incapable of filling any kind of position in public office. 'Brexit' increasingly became a cover for the NF positions that Boris Johnson and Priti Patel are now enacting. While I wouldn't have supported a 'soft "Brexit"', either, had there been sensible exemptions to their total clampdown, things would have worked out much better.

Secondly, there's no telling how long the current 'crisis' will last. They'll undoubtedly have to continually correct the nonsense that has so far been carried out in response to further problems. However, I don't doubt that this will eventually get rid of at least the most visible problems, such as what has been happening in the last few days. Add a bit of management by the 'media', a bit of 'the Europeans are being beastly to us', and there you go.

Thirdly, I really think it's important to avoid the temptation of seeing the pre-'Brexit' state of affairs as a good one. It wasn't. The massive increase in unobstructed market size as including most of Europe led to the worst social policy since the Second World War, with conditions for poorer people described as akin to the Great Depression, long before 'Brexit'. The latter obviously doesn't help any of that, but it was hardly ideal before. The larger your market becomes, the greater the likelihood that there will be less regulation, and the inevitable consequence of that is that a few large players will dominate the market, reducing competition, reducing the number of jobs, reducing the number of smaller companies in the same field, and so on. I think that even with a large market, Europe would have functioned better had the euro not been introduced so hastily, and the blame for that lies squarely at the feet of serial idiot Helmut Kohl, who wanted to use it to help disguise his total mismanagement of the German economy, a version of which continues to this day, courtesy of hapless, unimaginative conservatives like Angela Merkel. Germany had to export because social conditions in the country had become far more unequal under Kohl and interior demand had gone down significantly, with many of the workers unable to afford the products of their own economy. Ironically, while the single market and the euro were designed to benefit Europe's larger economies, at the expense of its smaller economies, Britain couldn't really benefit from that because of the Thatcherite reduction of the diversity of its economy. For all these reasons, a German Tagesschau commentary is likely to see it from a perspective of what they see as German economic interests, read: the economic interests of German companies, particularly the largest ones.

While there may not be gloating, there's a distinct lack of self-criticism. At the end of the day, there's just a battle of Europe's conservatives, e.g. Johnson and von der Leyen went to the same school in Brussels.

Friend of mine works opposite one. Loving her videos of the CARnage.

Twats.

Grape picking sucks. Trufax.

If its anything like grape picking its long, hard and painful work. Well my middle class capitalist pig body thought so in France.

Sounds like the strawberry picking I did occasionally in the summers at sixth form.

In my head: hazy summer morning, chatting to the farmer about butter and cider, hedgehogs snuffling around protecting their strawberries.

In reality: painful work, competitively trying to pick more by weight than colleagues before days quota is made, unable to move the next day.

I think it's probably the hardest job I ever had.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-58733754

Clown shortage: Appeal for new recruits in Northern Ireland

"Because all the circuses in Europe and in England have been up and operational for the past six months, that huge pool of EU artists are already back at work and up until last week we haven't been able to even get visas issued for non-EU artists and entertainers," Mr Duffy said.

Odd story considering we have the biggest clown school in the world.

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It's a true metaphor for Brexit, and NI in general

I hink Westminster isn't any better, lead by the King Evil Clown ;)

The big irony for me is that they cannot get clowns work visas because it is seen as low skilled work...so pretty much anything is then, driving a lorry, many cultural jobs, being a university assistant, a PHD worker... being a starting care home worker... I mean, wtf?

Of course the current omnishambles is providing a lot of entertainment outside the UK.

I think it's probably the hardest job I ever had.

I used to wash those plastic boxes/trays that loose veg comes in at supermarkets. 15000 of them a day, starting at 6:30am using a dual conveyor belt machine where at 6:30am the water was scalding hot and by 3:30pm it was freezing cold. All week and a half day on Saturday. People were nice but the work was awful... but better than "grading" tomatoes, peppers or cucumbers; easier jobs but soul-destroying and mind-emptying.

My first job out of school was confiscating abandoned vehicles for Lewisham council, and crushing them if need be. There was a fair bit of aggro that came when the territory.

On the plus side it kept me fit. I would take constant threats of physical violence over proper hard physical labour any day of the week.

confiscating abandoned vehicles for Lewisham council, and crushing them

Fuck. I'd pay to have that job now.

I'd pay extra if I could choose the cars and leave the drivers in, obviously.

Fuck. I'd pay to have that job now

They paid me £5.25ph back then! I felt like Elon Musk with £210 in my back pocket on a Friday night in the Royal Oak in Lee Green.

Mind you, coke and pills were more expensive in those days