Hands that do Dishes

Once we led the way to an industrialised society. Utilising the skills of all our craftsmen and artisans honed over the centuries, we fashioned new ways to meeting tomorrows desires. Now we hardly make anything or at best assemble some others production. Too puny to take on the world markets with an exhausted worn out industry that has since been pulverised. Just the memories of a once rich trading nation linger on.


End of the line? Relegated forever to being a service provider, licking the boots of those nations with the wealth? Not my view of our Nation. We do have to reinvent ourselves of course. As a staring point then, an inventory. An inventory of our handworking skills, not our software or accounting, but those skills we have had to make or fashion objects. As a nation we are noted for being creative, skilled in adapting, having a high technical competences and a wealth of generations of passed on craft skills. 

This is the resource pool we need to capitalise on before we lose everything. We promote ourselves to do what we are really good at. The one-off, the proto-type the pre-production modelling, the mould maker, the pre-production test bed, this is our forte. Able to access and modify the electronics and software controls with the craft skills to fashion hightech products out of raw material or re-cycled spare parts. With the ingenuity to see solutions where others see impossible problems and a high design backoffice to call on. This is what we take to the world market and flog. Got an idea, let us flesh it out for you and demonstrate how it can be turned into a marketable product and on to mass production.


We have to seize this vision of a future and invest in the infrastructure to make it happen. Invest in apprenticeships in all the old and current production techniques, encourage the setting up of production plant and develop the skills to operate them. So invest in schools, training, materials sciences, production techniques and electronic and software controls. Certainly not directly by central government who have a proven deadhand in the status quo but making start-up grants and loans readily available with generous extended paybacks for 'successful' businesses. Let our budding entrepreneurs seek out the rich seams, let them use their ingenuity to overcome market obstacles. Government being there, consistent, supportive, encouraging, being helpful when needed and quick to network problems to solution finders. That way we might still have a meaningful future as a Nation.

Flawed Model

Recently I flirted with Twitter. The more I looked the more concerned I became. It seems to me that Twitter is fundamentally flawed, it operates like an inverted pyramid selling game. In the long run is just is not sustainable. Eat my words?

Social networking is the new buzz, the new way to be free, express ourselves and make undreamt of connections. Unlike Facebook, Twitter requires you, as your starting point, to select six person whose tweets you most want to follow. Then, based on that initial selections, encourages you to select other related tweeters to select to follow. 

This is in direct contrast to Facebook which start out with the friends you do know and offers to extend your circle to other connections which have a connection back the the friends you have. Your choice, your pool, you decide pond or ocean.

Back to Twitter then. How does any one person end up with 20 million people following their every cough and sneeze of a tweet? Do they have something that is so original so earth shattering to say that 20 million people are agog for their next pronouncement. I think not. 

Your own tweet is just a grain of sand on the beach, indistinguishable from all the other grains, lost in the sea of sands. Only your tweets that are ripostes to that some august body count and might possibly get noticed. How to be become an august body? Why by being promoted as a person being offered for selection. Who gets to decided which persons tweets are worth being offered for selection? By the originators of this pyramid scam. It is all very self-referential. Only the deemed noteworthy are offered and therefore only they can increase their followers, which then pushes them up the ranking to become an even higher favourite selection. That is why a Miss Withnothingtosay can end up having 20 million followers. Not as a direct response of her undoubted wide and universal popular appeal but just the way the network is stacked. 

In my world a twit was a fool, a numbskull who made wrong choices. Or a twittering was the raucous sound made by a large flock of sparrows. By either definitions, Twitter certainly has found the right word analogies to rest amongst.

Wanted - role model

Within my life time the family has gone from conservative and insular to global and transient. Not mine, but families around me were centred on the close family units of the parents, the Aunts and Uncles and the Grandparents. This closed circle set the norm for what you could or could not do, what interests were possible and how you expressed yourself. They provide the reference point and were quick to correct any deviation. From within their safe haven and encircled by their safety shield the children grew and were invited to discover, explore and gain experience in the surrounding world of shops, church, amusements, sports and the evening out and the occasional film. They set the norms of dress and speech and expected conformity. They set the bar and were the only role model to follow. The radio, the newspaper and magazines or the annual trip might give insights into other possible lifestyle. But just brief glimpses, nothing substantive to base a breakaway lifestyle on. Even your school fellows were social clones. You were the product of your immediate society. 

Then came television, breaking apart the insular family time together, introducing appreciable insights in to the how others live, offering tangible alternatives. Television plus of course social mobility. The freedom to roam and spread, dispersing the family core, breaking forever the close bonds that tied families together. Lots of other social factors were also playing, but mobility and television were the key factors that finally broke the former almost total reliance on the family unit, to get by.

Nowadays the core family unit, of parent and children, cannot compete against the rival attractions of  television, personal computer, online social media, live streaming of news or entertainment, virtual avatars. The family unit is dysfunctional, it can no longer sit together at best spending quality time relaxing in each others company at worst just updating each other on events. Even the core unit of parents is challenged with a single parent, with possibly serial partners, becoming the norm. So what role models do our children of today encounter that will give substance to their perception of who they are and the society they inhabit?  Not the schools with their imposed roles to mentor our new citizens and assume quasi-parental duties. The contacts are too fleeting, too transient, too impersonal to really count. We are just left with the the fictions they are now surrounded by, of cardboard caricature soap stars, media celebrity fantasy lives or even worse some ephemeral virtual being lacking any substance beyond a spotty teenagers imagination. 


In this global connected world the old role models are totally irrelevant. Right? Wrong, when even the language we speak modifies our thinking and logic structures what chance have we of assimilating other cultures. I defy any English born native speaking person dropped into the middle of say China, or India, or South America, to feel at ease and be able to comprehend the reactions and intentions of the people now surrounding them, let alone elicit favourable reactions to their aspirations. No, we are of our society. As I explored in Know Yourself, who we are as individual depends on the society we are born into. We have to have relevant role models to inflate and guide our sense of being, as that person within that society. Without it lies insecurity, anxiety, misplacement, that feeling of never belonging never being understood. We have to rethink our societies evolution. As a start we have to restructure the family unit as I explored in A baby is for life.

Know Yourself

My experience has been that employment agencies look only to find the best fit box to stuff you in that they can then promote to likely employers. Despite all the profiling and other gimmicky that they might surround themselves with, their primary objective is to find that best fit box with the highest turnover and the best commission and then move on as fast as possible. They are certainly not in the business of looking at you as a blank piece of paper to assess the skills and experience you have to offer. All too complicated and time consuming. The best fit box is a fast but dirty way of summing you up into readily recognisable sectors, be it sales, education, health or whatever.

Likewise with your employer, their primary goal is to get you productive and income generating as fast and cleanly as possible. They too are looking for nice neat boxes to put you in, best fitting your past with their operational needs. No niceties, a people person, a problem solver, a task finisher, find and stuff you into the best fit box and get you working fast. Fair enough they need to profit out of your labour. The box you are put into of course only reflects the opportunities and experience's you have been allowed in the past. They are in no way reflective of your actual skill or mind set or where your aptitude really lies, if only you were given the chance. No one has the time or even perhaps the judgement set to gauge how good you might be, but only what you have previously demonstrated. Those boxes you find yourself in you get to carry forward throughout your working life. The chance to breakfree and start with a clean slate, or that white piece of paper, just never comes. You carry your past baggage forward with you, not your choice, not your wish, not your aspiration, it just accumulates and becomes the measure yardstick for all your futures.

You of course know yourself extremely well. Right? Wrong! Imagine yourself in a totally white room, floor, walls, ceiling, no windows no doors, just white sound, white scent and white surrounds.  Now who are you? Not your name, not your history, not your description. But who are you, that inner person? What we are, this inner person, is in response. In response to your surroundings, to the people you last had contact with, with the after tremors of the last physical experience. Your sub-concious and concious responses to these other stimuli are what drives your awareness of who you are. But it is more than this because we too bring baggage. We are not white pieces of paper with each fresh encounter. We bring the past along with us which shapes our reactions this time and moulds the future possibles. Worse still prior experiences limit our range of possible responses and the people we meet recognise and or have preconceptions of your reactions which limit the range of what you can or cannot do in response. We are limited by our past. Not immutable, subtly shifting and adapting, we evolve but within the constraints of what we were and did last time. Not fixed, you could wake up and start out with a clean white piece of paper, inventing a new personality for yourself. Except your physical baggage and all those people you associate with drag you back to what you were. Not you, the who you would like to be, within the constraints of your innate personality. The me that I can be and am, are but reflections of my past and peoples expectations of me.

It is a leap, a small leap, more of just a progression really. How the government views or has expectations of its citizens, directly influences how the citizen sees themselves, how they respond and react. Treated with disdain, suspicion, regarded as flawed, with limit capacity to think rationally or behave with a modicum of decency, they get citizens just like that but pushed to extremes. Regard your citizens with respect, expect the highest standards and they will rise to that confidence in them and often exceed expectations. The we, whether employer, individual or citizen just want recognition and encouragement to do better. Not much to ask is it.