This is the best British sit-com since The Peter Principle.
In fact, it more or less is the Peter Principle, only it's set in a job centre, not a bank and the main character is female, not male.
It's on ITV2, Wednesday 10 o'clock.
Sunday, 19 October 2014
The Job Lot
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14 comments:
As this programme deals with people whose jobs have a questionable social utility, I will drag up the old debate about Will Machines Put us All out of Work? which my concerns about technological redundancy were reduced to by the usual suspects a few weeks ago.
Tony Dolphin (mock not that thou be not mocked)writes in todays's Observer
"The growth of technology in the workplace means many jobs that existed 30 years ago are no longer required. Across whole swathes of industry workers on production lines have gradually been replaced by robots. Factories that once employed tens, or even hundreds, of people are now run by machines and a handful of maintenance workers....Offices have changed as well .No longer are they populated by filing clerks and typing pools."
Clashes with the best aussie soap since Prisoner Cell Block H - Wentworth on 5.
Well it is more or less Cell Block H, but with better looking actresses, explicit lesbian sex scenes, more blood and gore and an even nastier Joan Ferguson!
DBCR sigh.
Steven_L,
It's on ITV player as well.
DBC, we've done that one to death.
All this automation is very unpleasant for the small number of people who are made redundant, but great for everybody else. And the unemployment rate is not much different now than it was a few hundred years ago
SL, that is why I linked to the ITV-player.
L, you can't argue with facts. Well you can, but it's a waste of time.
TS, exactly!
Silly me to doubt the establishment's all round sagacity: a good night's sleep and now I can see that we live in the best of all possible world's where economic policy is guided by the wisest (and the richest).A little bit of austerity (reducing wages and benefits)has really done the trick for the last four years and we all benefitting to the tune of some quite funny shows on the television.
As for doing things to death I can remember a long slog on here in which MW patronised me unmercifully for daring to suggest that banks do not really lend out their savers' money but create new money under cover of the loan process.
(This is not irrelevant as the old Major Douglas way of dealing with robots is to create unearned National Dividends and dish them out to bring production to full capacity).
But we don't want anything in the least bit radical on here do we? Lets just stick with the maths of the most politically unimplementable form of LVT going and relax in front of the telly, job done.
NB You have no way of talking about rates of unemployment hundreds of years ago. Figures were not kept until the 20th cent.
(We have good figures for real wages: these are at their lowest since the crash of 1862 and miles lower than the 1930's (when applications of the small electric motor were compensating for the collapse of traditional heavy industries. Of course farm land values were collapsing round London where the vacuum cleaner factories were being set up so if you could get there [people used to walk from S.Wales] there was some hope).But the magic Free market fairy has come up with nothing to satisfy the Kondradtieff renewal criteria this time.
DNCR @ 09.33 Double Sigh.
I realised the other day that I've never sat down and watched a current British sitcom with my kids, as the family-friendly ones are all terrible.
But we all like The Big Bang Theory, 30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother and Parks and Recreation.
Coooo. You lot don't half watch a lot of telly...
We should not be buying into the guff about the Magic Free Market Fairy providing alternative employment for those made redundant by technological change.We should be playing it up as a serious problem because it draws attention to the fact that people can't move to where there's work because property is too expensive .And we know why.
The land market as impediment to alternative work
argument should be one of our clinchers but you are all determined to say that the free market makes all problems disappear .Hey presto!
Come to think of it, the decline in real wages to the lowest in 150 years isn't really happening either.
"Come to think of it, the decline in real wages to the lowest in 150 years isn't really happening either."
Are you talking about average wages or minimum earnings? Do the figures take into account the New Speenhamland System (aka Working Families Tax Credits)?
I find it hard to believe that workers are earning less now than at a time when people were literally starving to death through lack of income.
DBC,
"We should not be buying into the guff about the Magic Free Market Fairy providing alternative employment for those made redundant by technological change.We should be playing it up as a serious problem because it draws attention to the fact that people can't move to where there's work because property is too expensive .And we know why.
The land market as impediment to alternative work"
I used to work across the road from Newbury Job Centre and watched people going in, while the centre of Newbury had dozens of shop jobs going.
More than anything it's about the disincentives to work - if you take a low paid shop job you lose so much in benefits that it's hardly worth it.
TS, my kids like Big bang, but most of all they like Family Guy.
DBC: "you are all determined to say that the free market makes all problems disappear"
To be honest, yes I would. But taxing employment and output to subsidise landowners is not a free market. That's where most unemployment comes from. End of.
@MW
Some reality check is in order : the percentage of people who believe in a completely free market AND LVT must be less than 1.0. I have never come across the likes of Lola who bang on about complete non-interference , not even help, from the public sector and can, simultaneously
mount a thorough argument for LVT.
As for organisations ! The ASI should ,by definition support both but if you Google Adam Smith Institute Land Value Tax , what do you get? The usual suspects that's what: Mark Wadsworth and Jock Coats. Nothing official.
As far as the usual headbangers who prate on about SME's being left alone to do what they want, its absolutely clear that they regard LVT as the very worst kind of government interference (which is only good in their minds for restricting the freedom of movement of people around the EU, an organisation their Conservative Party freely entered into) .
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