Pendraken Plans for 2020!

[Orcs]

As you all know I am a cynic.

I suspect that the likes of Mc Donald's/KFC thought "we are going to loose lots of money on running as a take away/delivery service lets lays staff off while the Government picks up the tab"

[Leon]

Thanks again for the supportive messages, it means a lot at this end.  We'll all get through this together as we always do, it's just a bit of a worrying time for everyone.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when things return to normal as well, after we've seen such a surge of new jobs in supermarkets, warehousing, delivery, etc.  Once the panic buying and need for delivered foodstuffs has gone, all of those people are going to be laidoff in a new wave of job losses, and there may not be enough returning vacancies in the pubs, hotels and restaurants for them to switch to.  It's going to be a very dynamic marketplace for jobs for quite some time.

Another effect that I've been wondering about is how much long-term changes we'll see in workplace cultures.  All of those people who've been told for years that working from home isn't viable, but they've suddenly had to do it and it's been fine.  The initiative we've seen from various industries who've pivoted their businesses to new products or new ways of delivering their service to the customer, which they might find is a better avenue going forward.  I think there's going to be a lot of upheaval as a result of this and possibly some real benefits to people's work/life balance.

[pierre the shy]

Thanks again for the supportive messages, it means a lot at this end.  We'll all get through this together as we always do, it's just a bit of a worrying time for everyone.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when things return to normal as well, after we've seen such a surge of new jobs in supermarkets, warehousing, delivery, etc.  Once the panic buying and need for delivered foodstuffs has gone, all of those people are going to be laidoff in a new wave of job losses, and there may not be enough returning vacancies in the pubs, hotels and restaurants for them to switch to.  It's going to be a very dynamic marketplace for jobs for quite some time.

Another effect that I've been wondering about is how much long-term changes we'll see in workplace cultures.  All of those people who've been told for years that working from home isn't viable, but they've suddenly had to do it and it's been fine.  The initiative we've seen from various industries who've pivoted their businesses to new products or new ways of delivering their service to the customer, which they might find is a better avenue going forward.  I think there's going to be a lot of upheaval as a result of this and possibly some real benefits to people's work/life balance.

Yes 100% correct on that last point I think Leon.

I work in the public service and its been flagged to us that going forward at least some of us will be working from home at least some days once the COVID 19 crisis as passed.

I am finding it quite different working at home every day, but as you say it does give real benefits to work/life balance.... the commute time is going down one flight of steps 

[Orcs]

So al this working from home now, and quite possibly significant increase in home working permanently - Why ae we spending so much on HS2.

[hammurabi70]

It'll be interesting to see what happens when things return to normal as well

I think there's going to be a lot of upheaval as a result of this and possibly some real benefits to people's work/life balance.

I do not think 'normal' will be as we have known it; as with the World Wars the global position will be quite different from what anybody might have envisioned.  How will Asian countries like India and Indonesia cope with this?  How will Africa?  These are not wealthy areas and will have even more extreme issues to resolve.  No doubt pockets of the virus will linger in corners of the world for years, which will dampen enthusiasm for travel.  The tourism and travel industries will be changed with slimmed down airlines that have lost economies of scale so ticket prices will be higher.  Internal travel might get a boost but is a third runway at Heathrow worthwhile now?

We can be sure health concerns will be critical for the future and I wonder how the American health industry will cope and adapt; we are going to need a more global response so will world government come a step closer?

[mollinary]

Cruise industry has to be worried for its future too. With a silver surfer demographic as its main customer base, and a spate of horror stories from this outbreak, surely the days of the 3-5 thousand passenger liners must be numbered?

[Steve J]

With home working the company has a duty of care under the Health & Safety act to check where the employ is working, is it safe, does it comply with relevant regulations etc. You can imagine the nightmare of having to do this on each home in a large company.

[Techno]

I do not think 'normal' will be as we have known it; as with the World Wars the global position will be quite different from what anybody might have envisioned.

Totally agree, H....and with your thoughts as regards Asia and India....Just at this time, especially India.

Once we've all got through this....I think the World will be quite a different place.

Of all the tragedies that are occurring, the ones that I find the most upsetting, are the number of 'health workers' losing their lives

Cheers - Phil

(By the way, I think we probably missed your promotion a few posts ago...Congrats on that. )

[Sunray]

Thanks again for the supportive messages, it means a lot at this end.  We'll all get through this together as we always do, it's just a bit of a worrying time for everyone.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when things return to normal as well, after we've seen such a surge of new jobs in supermarkets, warehousing, delivery, etc.  Once the panic buying and need for delivered foodstuffs has gone, all of those people are going to be laidoff in a new wave of job losses, and there may not be enough returning vacancies in the pubs, hotels and restaurants for them to switch to.  It's going to be a very dynamic marketplace for jobs for quite some time.

Another effect that I've been wondering about is how much long-term changes we'll see in workplace cultures.  All of those people who've been told for years that working from home isn't viable, but they've suddenly had to do it and it's been fine.  The initiative we've seen from various industries who've pivoted their businesses to new products or new ways of delivering their service to the customer, which they might find is a better avenue going forward.  I think there's going to be a lot of upheaval as a result of this and possibly some real benefits to people's work/life balance.

A very insightful post Leon.  I have read it several times.    It is regrettable that the British Gov declined to "test, trace, isolate" it  seems to
be working in Korea and Ireland.

There is be a frenzy come the late summer to reboot the economy.  To be first nation in Europe back to work.   A lot of industry will need a serious re-boot.   And yes, a very dynamic marketplace in terms of jobs and skills.

The survivors will be chastened.  After 9/11 there was a drop in  pornography.  There is be an element of survivor guilt.  Religion could well make a comeback "revival"?  With a lot of couples at home a baby boom is inevitable.   What corollaries will it have on Brexit and the future of the United Kingdom?

Could - like post war Britain we see a swing for social justice? An end to austerity measures?   Will the free nester/silver surfers still be a cash rich demographic ? 

By the end of the century, the history students will face exam questions on our life and times.   "The Anti CORVID 19 and Post CORVID 19 society and values - discuss"

[jimduncanuk]

I'm glad I am retired at this time of national stress.

I worked in IT management and support and my working style was to see the user face to face and sort out his computing needs while I was there. There was a move to remote system management where you sat at a desk 10 miles away and did everything online. I resisted that move until the day I retired.

If I had still been working I would have been forced into the remote style of working, perhaps from home and I wouldn't have liked it one little bit. Then again I could have been made surplus to requirements and discarded in some fashion.

I think the workplace for everyone will be under severe scrutiny once things return to 'normal' and many folks will not like what will happen.

[sultanbev]

As I've said on other forums, do we even want to "return to normal"? Austerity, socialism for the rich, privatisation for the poor, homelessness, , benefit sanctions, income inequality, a butchered NHS, more Disaster Capitalism, more ecological destruction, pointless mega-bridges when we can't even fill all the potholes, more murder of wildlife disguised as hunting and environmental management. More zero-hour contracts and gig economy? No thankyou!

I've been working from home for a decade, best move I ever did. If you think about it in terms of ecology, mental health, time and energy, the concept of a long commute to work is actually one of the worst inventions ever.

Hopefully the massive drop in oil burning, travelling, pointless holidays abroad and air travel will be permanent. The drop in pollution will save 7-8 million lives a year worldwide, 30-40,000 in the UK alone. If you want to see what a difference it makes, just go out the door in the dark and look up at the stars - usually it took 30 minutes for your eyes to adjust to see not many - now I go out and can see loads immediately. Maybe more people will learn, and more importantly be given the opportunity to learn, to build a life you don't need a holiday from, which is my motto.

There will be a recession, short or long, and employment will change. Localism will be a key discussion point, such that regional bodies, whether it's a co-operative down the road of 5 houses, or an entire county council, should be empowered to be more resilient in meeting citizens' needs and meeting future threats. I recently read a scientific paper that shows there are another 10,000-600,000 of these diseases out there, just waiting to cross-attach as we encroach more and more into the last few wild places on the planet. If you think Covid-19 is sh#t, wait while the next one. Or the one after that.
Maybe we'll look at sourcing our energy, materials and foodstuffs more locally, whilst at the same accepting the realisation that has come to many now that we can all actually get by on a lot less stuff.

Other challenges exist, apart from our precarious "just-in-time" supply chains. Much of the Fylde coast for example, will have to be relocated in the next 30 years.

https://coastal.climatecentral.org/map/10/-2.9814/53.6471/?theme=sea_level_rise&map_type=coastal_dem_comparison&contiguous=true&elevation_model=best_available&forecast_year=2050&pathway=rcp45&percentile=p50&return_level=return_level_1&slr_model=kopp_2014
(Then scroll right and look at the east coast - Pendraken Towers will be able to load orders directly onto boats.....)

Hopefully, and something I'm actively involved in with the Incredible Edible Network, we'll see urban food growing increase exponentially. The crisis in the fruit industry makes this clear - they need 90,000 workers by mid-April, 10,000 applied already but most are too far from where the work is. Not everyone can upsticks and live in a caravan on a farm for 4 months whilst they work. So overall a radical relook at land use, both urban and rural, will have to be an outcome.

The crisis also reinforces the need for a UBI. All these complicated emergency 80%-of-wage-payment schemes and extended SSP could all be avoided with a guaranteed UBI of £200 a week. With appropriate rent controls so that unscrupuluous landlords can't put up rents by £199 a week. It can be managed through the existing tax rebate system for the vast majority of people. This would also reduce the number of civil servants and private companies required to administer our over-complicated and toxic benefit systems - if you don't know anything about Universal Credit and PIP tests, now is the time, like the 500,000 unfortunates that already have to, to learn how horrific they are.

But beware Disaster Capitalism - the likes of Trump and Cummings use crises like these to force through unpopular changes and take away basic rights (even more so than has already happened in the last decade), and even now the US are using it to give public money to already rich corporations. As a eugenicist Cummings has publically stated he thinks education is wasted on the poor, so expect an attempt to see the schools reopen later ths year as fee-paying ones.

This is a hot topic on various "left-of-centre" forums I frequent, that this crisis is an opportunity for a change for the better. if enough people do something about it. If not, we'll just get more of the same that we had after the 2008 crash, but on steroids. Either way, it can safely be predicted going "back to normal" just isn't going to happen.

[FierceKitty]

Some good points there. But very few people on this planet will relate to most of it. The worst butcher's bill is clearly going to be presented to the landless. those doing jobs that need hands, not computers, and the poor bastards that most countries still regard as numbers, not human beings. Italy is the country I love best in the world, and I hate to think what it's suffered; but it's India that casts the darkest shadow in my mind right now.

[Techno]

; but it's India that casts the darkest shadow in my mind right now.

Ditto.

Cheers - Phil

[Steve J]

It could be as bad or worse in sub-Saharan Africa as it is in India. To be honest we will never be able to know due to the virtually non-existent government health care over there. They've put Lagos and Abuja on lockdown, but not other places such as Ibadan, Africa's biggest town but in reality as big as a city.

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Well, teaching a school of 3 and setting remote work for my other class has been interesting.

It might be the start of the end for the chalk face...

[Techno]

It could be as bad or worse in sub-Saharan Africa as it is in India.

Good point, Steve ! 

Cheers - Phil

[FierceKitty]

It could be as bad or worse in sub-Saharan Africa as it is in India. To be honest we will never be able to know due to the virtually non-existent government health care over there. They've put Lagos and Abuja on lockdown, but not other places such as Ibadan, Africa's biggest town but in reality as big as a city.

Also true.

[sultanbev]

"But very few people on this planet will relate to most of it."

True, but the reasoning behind XR for example was that you only need to reach a tipping point in awareness to get some kind of change. Will this crisis push us over that tipping point? Probably not Here it will depend on the mainstream media - if they continue to be sychophants to the embedded establishment, then I'm afraid not. If however the facade crumbles from within and MSM journalists start doing their job properely, and holding the establishment to account, then there is a chance. There was an example t'other day, when someone asked Gove did he now regret cutting all the NHS beds and services in the past decade - Gove and his assistant were unable to answer and were flumoxed when their narrative of the last 15 years had been exposed as garbage in one sentence.

"It could be as bad or worse in sub-Saharan Africa as it is in India...."
Yes, this is where the large numbers will come in. However the websites tracking the numbers will become more and more inaccurate, I suspect in a lot of these places, we will never know the exact numbers. I see in South Africa they were using rubber bullets to enforce social distancing 

"Well, teaching a school of 3 and setting remote work for my other class has been interesting."
Do you think this could be done nationally all the time? Other than teaching food growing and doing sports/exercise, is there an actual need to group lots of infectious children into warehouses to teach them? It might end the tryanny of school uniforms which some school heads use as a price gouging racket; playground bullying, and reduce peer pressure over branded clothing perhaps, and be a smack in the face for Cummings and his ilk, who on trying to enforce fee paying shcools, finds that the teachers and teached merely make their own arrangements.
It's this kind of thinking of how we might do things differently is very important. Just having the narrative is critical.

[Techno]

Hey..... congratulations on your promotion, SB.

Cheers - Phil

[Orcs]

Some interesting points there Sultanbev. Some like bringing in fee paying schools I feel are an extreme view. Others I think will certainly swing the way you have suggested even if they do not go as quite as far, or become a permanent way of doing things.

There has always been and always will be income in-equality unless you go down the communism / animal farm route that has proved to be unsustainable. Yes there is a need to support those who for reasons beyond their control need additional income. But as someone who pays a significant sum in tax and NI I would like to see it directed more to those who need and deserve it, and less to those who "shout for more" while wasting what they have been given.  

The problem with a UBI of £200 is that those earning £18000 a year will effectively be only earning £2.50 an hour more than those sitting at home doing nothing.  Not much of an incentive for a cleaner at a hospital, or a day doing a tiring job at a factory.  And who is going to pay for this £200 a week?  If you tax the rich, they will move themselves and their assets elsewhere, and all revenue from them will stop.

I also agree that many landlords are charging an unfair rent. The ability to take "Buy to let" mortgages being the cause of this. However, to crack down to hard on this could well cause huge problems in the housing market by causing a vast drop in house prices. This is all well and good if you rent or you have not planned to use your house for you pension, as many self-employed have.

I suspect after this there will be a large boost to the NHS, although bear in mind it was Tony Blairs left of centre Government that caused many of the issues in today's NHS.  I work with the NHS on a daily basis and see huge amounts of money going to waste.  A real example being two data circuits costing £70,000 odd a year EACH, being left connected to a derelict hospital for 5 years, loosing over £750K, when taking into account the charges for lost equipment. So there is definitely a need to address this even if more money is then needed

While I am against fox hunting, management of wildlife is necessary to protect the environment, granted the reason we have to do this is because of the vast amounts of land we have taken for building of all types, agriculture etc and even providing allotments, to say nothing of the loss of natural predators. eg Deer need culling because we no longer have wolves in this country.  

We have incredible countryside and beautiful scenery all around the UK, and  I agree that we will probably  see an upsurge in holidays in this country, at least initially until people remember why they went abroad in the first place, the weather. It is no fun being on holiday in this country with several children when you have torrential rain for most of your holiday. Particuarly when the cost is as much if not more than going somewhere the weather can be almost guaranteed to be nice.

What we paid for a week (Off Season) in a small two bedroom cabin in Cornwall last year, would have paid for a large 3 bed villa with a private pool in Florida for a fortnight. Had we wanted two weeks away it would have been cheaper to Fly to Florida than take the cabin for two weeks.  I expect the rental prices in Florida will fall significantly next year even if flights go up.  I would rather go abroad once every two years than have main holidays in the UK every year.  So British holiday companies will need to sort their pricing structure to combat this. The other reason of "pointless" foreign holidays is to see things vist places like the Pyramid, Colosseum , or see the unique beauty of New England in the Autumn (fall for our US Cousins) learn and enjoy the different cultures etc.

I  am unable to build a life that I don't want or need a holiday from, or be given the ability to lerarn  as that is not possible in the job I do.  It can be very stressful and tiring, in our office,  but our office

As yet there is no real alternative to the internal combustion engine, They are currently not able to produce the batteries in the quantities needed to replace all the cars in the world In general the public are currently unable to afford them. To produce the necessary electricity we need to build several nuclear power stations, that our government could not afford before this crisis, let alone the problems of charging the vehicles and the infrastructure to do it.