evolutionIsScary

Twenty eight is nothing. I'm a British citizen in my 60s and looking for an entry-level role in IT. I graduated in the mid-to-late 1980s. No luck so far after several months of applications.

Woodworking/carpentry. You never stop learning and you have the pleasure of seeing the tangible results of your actions, right in front of you. You have to buy a certain number of tools (saws, chisels, clamps, a screwdriver, etc) but you may have many of those anyway. Avoid getting electrical tools for as long as you can. I started woodworking after having done lots of repairs to my house. I realised I had a lot of the tools. Those that I didn't have I bought secondhand, eg chisels, which I taught myself how to sharpen after watching lots of YouTube videos. You can make stuff for your house. I'm making a kitchen bin that will fit nicely under a worktop. I have a million other projects that will keep me going until I die (which, with any luck, won't be for another 25 years!), for example replacing the pine skirting boards in all rooms with oak versions that have gargoyles on them, making storage boxes, making tools, making a window seat, etc, etc, etc.

hookers

That Britain had a right to treat the citizens of the colonies like dirt. In other words to treat people like dirt in their own countries. Funny really considering that an awful political party looks as if it will win the next election, in other words a party whose members were all about leaving the EU because they didn't like foreigners telling them what to do but still celebrated how Britain treated other people in their *own* countries like poo.

and why pay the awful energy companies any more than we have to?

During the day I work at home and the temperature inside my house is usually 14ºC. I'm not feeling any ill effects yet. Right now it's nearly 4pm. I'm in the southeast of England and the temperature in my house is 12ºC. I wear lots of layers of clothing, two pairs of socks, warm slippers and a hat. In my lap I have a blanket under which is a hot water bottle. I have a blanket wrapped around my shoulders too. I haven't yet had a cold this winter. When I go to bed I leave the heating on with the thermostat set at 10ºC. On some nights I turn off the heating and leave one bedroom window open just a crack as this gets rid of the disgusting cigarette smoke that gets into my house from the neighbours' house in the early hours. My house is not badly insulated but the walls are double-skin brick, ie no cavity or insulation between the skins. I am, however, mid-terrace and insulation beneath the attic floor is fairly thick if not quite up to regulation. I hate the cold, which makes me wonder whether people have gone a bit soft over the centuries. I mean, if I can put up with the cold, why can't other people? Twenty years ago, when energy was a lot cheaper, I used to turn the thermostat up to 21ºC and walk around the house in a t shirt in winter. Even if I win the lottery I'll never do that again.

Poland sounds bad.

Gibraltar. It's warm all year round.

Maybe this will cheer people up a bit if they are alone over Christmas. My parents were not Christians, so we never celebrated Christmas when I lived with them as a child. I don't feel alone at this time of year despite the fact that I live alone, my parents are dead or dying, I no longer have any other family in Britain and have no friends here either. All of the people I know are with their families in other countries. However, is being with your kith and kin all it's cracked up to be? For example, during those Christmases when I've been at my sister's house abroad I've always ended up swearing at my brother in law and telling his family what I think of them. I wouldn't normally. But, you know, the yuletide alcohol gets to you and before you know it you can't help being a little too frank. On those few times I meet them, at other times of the year, I just ignore them and their insults. I'm using this holiday to do constructive things: learning about the industry I want a new job in, cleaning the house and making those repairs I had put off earlier in the year. Admittedly I have been off my head on red wine while doing those things but that's neither here nor there. When else do you get this much time to yourself? The point is this: if I don't feel alone at this time of year, why should you? Remember that we're all going to die one day. My advice is to think of what you'll be thinking on the day of your death, which, we all seem to forget, will assuredly arrive one day. What will you wish you had done and what you had not bothered doing? Use Christmas to start doing those things you have always put off.

I hate the cold but over the last few days the inside of my house has been 12ºC or less. It had been 14ºC for months before that. The trick is to wear lots of clothing, including a hat and scarf. And if you sit at a computer in the daytime, as I do, put a hot water bottle in your lap and wrap yourself in blankets. I'm going to resist turning on the heating for as long as possible. I thought I would have to do that today but the sunshine has warmed things up to a comfortable 13ºC.

You are obviously too young to have experienced Radio One DJs of the past, people like Simon Bates, Dave Lee Travis, Mike Reid, Noel Edmonds and, although he wasn't a radio DJ, everyone's favourite Jimmy Saville. In comparison however awful today's radio DJs are, they are not insufferable!

I can tell you what goes on in the Apple store in my town in the southeast. W\*nkerism is what. Every time I have to buy something made by Apple I'm filled with dread because I always need the ting immediately, so I have to visit our Apple store, where they only employ w\*nkers. Every experience is bad. Their customer service is awful. There was one time I needed something like a new mouse. I asked one of the people working there to get one down for me from a high shelf. His reaction was just like it would have been if I'd asked him whether I could have a quick romantic relationship (if you see what I mean) with his mother. Another time there was a man in a black woolly hat using rubber bands to exercise his fingers. He'd obviously been watching a film with a geek in it and felt he had to mimic the character (think of Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys). I asked him a question about whether my software would work on Apple's new operating system (it was a while ago, obviously) and his answer turned out to be completely wrong. Another time I tried to pay for a product, asking someone there politely which person would be able to accept my money. The person I spoke to waved vaguely at some other part of the store and said, "Ask him to take your credit card," without telling me which person out of the many there she meant. When I asked her to be more specific she went and got a colleague while displaying a thinly veiled disgust that I should trouble her in that way. W\*nkerism at its finest. That's what goes on at Apple stores if the one in my town is anything to go by.

Hello, Jacob Rees-Mogg here. I think the problem of the relative slovenliness of people in Britain compared with Europeans, for example, could be solved by issuing all British citizens a top hat. And a monocle. And they should all save up to send their children to Eton.

I'm a great believer in the idea that the only thing that stops anyone from learning anything is terrible explanations. That, to me, is the real problem, not whether one language, like Python, is the best choice or not when you are starting out. I've begun lots of videos that have promised to teach me, I don't know, Terraform in two hours only to become bored out of my skull in 15 minutes because the teaching is terrible (mainly because IT people generally do not know how to teach, because they don't know how to communicate) and to move on to watching videos of Rottweiler puppies for three hours straight. There's a reason why documentation can be awful. It's because many people who know how to do IT-type stuff are incredibly good at doing those kinds of things. What they are generally terrible at is communication, for example explaining how some library or other works. Good succinct explanations would make even the most difficult technology accessible to all. Think about Amazon Web Services. When I started to look into it a few years ago I became really depressed because I thought I had suddenly become stupid. It was almost impenetrable. Now that I know something about it I find myself asking, "Would it really hurt AWS to write just a few pages – just two, for crying out aloud – that tells beginners what the hell the whole thing is about?" I have just bought a book on Terraform. It's good but only because I already know about Terraform. Documentation is similar. Too much of it is written by people who think that everyone understands things already. In which case, why do they bother writing the documentation in the first place?

I wonder which newspapers the old man read.

Oxford University professor of history here. My speciality is post-War Britain. I'm not sure things were better in the 1960s. For example during that era everything was in black and white, or at least shades of grey – the cars, the clothes, the pets, the food. It was only until the 1970s that the citizens of Britain discovered colours. In fact colours became so popular that the BBC decided to broadcast its television signals in colour from the early 1970s to be able to portray the country accurately. In fact the number of rainbows in the sky increased dramatically in south London when colour TV became prevalent. This was a side effect of the transmission of the new type of signal from the aerial at Crystal Palace. The varied hues of the transmissions emanating from it interacted with the air in such a way as to create huge multi-coloured arches in the sky that many mistook for rainbows.

I find that when I don't understand some code, asking AI to explain it to me in simple terms works really well. AI is an antidote to terrible documentation. AI has taught me a lot and much quicker than if I had read a book. My suggestion is to tell AI something like, "Explain in simple terms what d and scanf are for in the C programming language." Then try using d and scanf in your code. By the way I don't know what those things are because I don't know any C. But if Were to start learning C, it's certain that AI would play a part in my learning.

At least you had this time when things were not as bad as they are going to be in the future.

There are many that I just can't stomach, mainly because the people here who use them want to appear cool or urbane or something. Here are a few: 1. Can I **get** a beer please 2. There are **way more** people here today than yesterday 3. How are you? **I'm good**

It seems only fair that the UK is centred on London as when you weigh up how much money goes out of the capital compared with how much comes in, the city is in the black. I think other regions are getting more attention from government. Politicians are waking up to the idea that the country outside the southeast has some catching up to do but nobody knows when that will happen. I mean when northerners, for example, will stop hunting mammoths for food and start going to supermarkets is anyone's guess.

I have decades of experience working for large companies involved in road-transport infrastructure, public organisations that procure that infrastructure and different legal bodies that liaise with local government to lobby for new such infrastructure, so I know what I'm talking about. That loop was one of many that formed an early experiment to relieve the monotony of driving on motorways, which in the 1950s were nearly all very long and very straight. The government of the time came to the conclusion that the public were at high risk of mental illness if they had to drive on motorways on journeys of 30 miles or more. The idea was that the mental straitjacket of British society at the time was something UK citizens yearned to free themselves of. The authorities soon came to the realisation that the motorways and the manner of their construction that sacrificed curves for speed, went against the zeitgeist as they forced drivers to take long straight paths, something that the general public were mentally rebelling against. Loops such as the one in the image the OP posted were created so that drivers could turn off the M6, say, and remind themselves that life was not all about staying on the straight and narrow. The loops were free of charge and you could do as many laps of them as you wanted to. I remember how on Bank Holiday weekends in the late 50s long queues would form at these loops just off the M1 in Bedfordshire as drivers craved the chance to rotate their steering wheels a bit after having driven for miles without the opportunity. Although these loops seem strange today, you have to remember that during the initial construction of the motorway network the authorities failed to allow the creation of enough rest stops such as service stations. Interestingly these now-quaint small circular roads are the origin of the expression 'going loopy'.

Get fit (advice which, if you saw my flabby lard arse, might make you legitimately think, 'What does that porker know about getting in shape?') and keep learning stuff that you find interesting. If you have the opportunity you could do an A level or go on a government-funded bootcamp of one kind or another. It's one way of having fun and makes you feel sort of young. Horses for courses, of course. Maybe you'd be happy volunteering and, in that way, help make the lives of others better. Whatever you do, a stronger mind, developed through a combination of physical exercise and mental exertion, will only help you deal with your own mortality better. My guess is that you're like me in that you thought the answer to the question of how to get to grips with death would come at some later date. That's what I thought in my 30s. Then in my 40s. Then in my 50s. Now, when I'm in my 60s, I can talk to my dad and get some idea about how the realisation that your death could be imminent makes you behave. I know the answer never really comes. You just develop an acceptance of the fact that one day you go. If I make it to my dad's age (mid 90s) I hope I'll have the courage to face death in the way that he's doing, ie with a sort of blasé attitude. It helps him that he is religious. Me, on the other hand, I'm an atheist, which means contemplating my own death can be troubling. To me it seems sort of bonkers that someone who feels 21 in their head will in the not too distant future simply cease to exist. I too feel that age in my head. But I have seen a few people die at an early age quite suddenly (one to covid and one to a brain haemorrhage that came out of the blue) when each was in his/her prime and enjoying life. I bet each of them thought death was something that would happen in the distant future. Maybe we have to learn to accept that sometimes death arrives unexpectedly. Any one of us could get hit by a bus tomorrow morning. Some people die at the age of five. So, to me, being grateful that I have made it into my 60s helps me a little to deal with the knowledge that one day when the Ring goes off it won't be the Amazon delivery driver. Instead when I open the door a tall boney figure in black cloth will be standing in front of me casually smirking with an expression on his face that says, "Surprised, you fool? You knew I'd come one day. Now follow me." In his hand will be a scythe.

I reported the event in Soho to the a service that allows you to do so, called something like crimeline or something, but about seven year later. I never even got a response. What happened to Robert Lindsay's daughter did make the national news. I learned about it by reading a story in the Daily Mail online. Let me again suggest you look up scopolamine on the internet. And let me repeat: that drug is from hell and is used in Britain by criminals. I hope you never become a victim of its misuse because it can kill you. I can't help thinking that things go on that don't always make the national news, perhaps because they are seemingly not credible. I'm a rational educated person, by the way. I don't believe in God or any nonsense like that. What happened to me was real.

These things do happen. More than a decade ago I got hit with scopolamine in Gerrard Street in Soho, London. It was lunchtime on a Saturday. I thought I was about to have a heart attack but the drug wore off in a few minutes. A man began yelling orders at me but his English was so poor I didn't really understand what he said and I walked on. About 25 years ago it didn't go so well for me. Someone blew scopolamine into my face at -- of all places -- the entrance to a Tesco superstore in a town 50 miles from London. On that occasion I lost £200. Only years later did I piece together what I had happened. Scopolamine is a chemical from hell. The actor Robert Lindsay's daughter had it administered to her when she was with friends outside at night in Soho. You might want to look up the drug on the internet. If a science-fiction novel included a story about a character having an invisible chemical blown into their face that, when breathed in, made them suggestible and unable to recall being robbed you'd be forgiven for thinking, "Naaah, that's a poor plot line; it's outlandish and not believable, not even in sci-fi." But scopolamine is real and criminals do use it in Britain.

Sometimes I can't bear it. In my two-bed mid-terrace house the smoke from the cigarettes of the neighbours on my right gets into all of my upstairs rooms and I can't get rid of it. If I open windows it just gets worse because the smoke gets drawn in. All I can do is wait until they stop smoking, which can be hours, and sometimes more than one of them engages in that disgusting habit. Worse still, the neighbours smell like ash trays when they are not actually smoking and I can smell them from inside my house when they are in their kitchen. They know that the smell and the smoke irritates me, not just mentally but physically too in the case of my throat. The problem is that they just don't care because they have an addiction. Having said that, things are actually a lot better than they were about five years ago, when I had different neighbours on my right. Those people made so much noise that they drove me to distraction over about 15 years. Worse, their horrible friends moved in on my left a year after they did and they simply stank of a mixture of stale incense, fresh cheap incense, old stale spices and body odour. Even kids in the street would comment on it as they walked home from school. Anyway both sets of neighbours have now gone. Now it's just the smokers. I have discovered that the way to get rid of unpleasant neighbours is to sing rude songs about them in my house. My strategy is not to sing so loudly that people in the street can hear me but not so quietly that the neighbours don't realise I'm doing it. Also I don't leave any windows open when I sing. That's how I got rid of the last two lots of neighbours. I live in the southeast and all of the houses in my street are private.

Wow. I would love to interact with one as your MIL did :)

I learned a few years ago that buzzards have wing tips that are rounded. Also they tend to fly high in the sky, not low like the bird in the picture, and buzzards are large compared with this bird. :)

It's a red kite. The government introduced them to the UK after bringing male-female pairs of them from, I think, Slovakia (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong here because I could well be) and they have spread far and wide. I have them flying above my house in the Southeast of England every day and they are beautiful. I love the noise they make. They are just magical. They used to exist in Britain but went extinct, perhaps because of loss of habitat but also maybe because of poisoning. Hence the reintroduction programme.

I'm 61 and looking for an entry-level job in technology. I'm in the UK, so things may be different where you are but I have done two government-funded bootcamps (one in data engineering and one that got me two SANS certificates in cybersecurity) and one free private bootcamp on full-stack (MERN) web development that also allowed me to get a Java certificate. I think I'll get a job but it will take 6 months, simply judging by the lack of opportunities in Britain and the agism that they say exists here if you are over 50. I don't want to retire. I want to keep working until I no longer can. I hope that one day, maybe when I'm 82, I go into work as usual and then mid-morning my colleagues notice that I've been strangely quiet over the last few hours. Then someone touches my shoulder and says, "I think he's asleep, but he seems terribly cold." And then after a few days they come to the terrible realisation that I'm dead. I'd say that 49 is not at all too old to learn new things. I feel that I am better at learning new things today than I have ever been. I want to start to learn German and Machine learning too. Having said that, when I was 60 it took me a while to remember that you can memorise things by reading and rereading them. It sounds funny but I had forgotten that and only relearned it when I was studying for my 1Z0-811 Java cert. So far the bootcamps and the certificates have cost me nothing except time. Hope this helps. Wishing you well.

thank you. that I didn't know! I will definitely try to obtain details of the company that way

thank you again. I think I may actually go and speak to the people working there to get the name of the company. Our local authority is pretty much useless in certain ways but I'll take your advice and contact them again, saying that I think they are operating illegally.

thank you. the question I am asking is how do I find out in the first place whether the company is operating illegally or not?

thank you. the problem is that I do not know the company's name. there are no signs on its property and the vans that turn up have no livery. presumably I'd only be able to search the Companies House database with a company name.

Add it to used engine oil or used vegetable oil in the ratio 1:2 and paint wooden garden fences with it. It will act as a preserver of the wood. The diesel/petrol will thin the oil so that it penetrates the wood well. The diesel/petrol eventually evaporates off and leaves only the oil behind. Use it on tool handles too. If you do woodwork you can use the mixture to preserve the wooden things you make such as handles, boxes, tools, etc. In black & white film Ice Cold In Alex the sergeant says the British army boils a kettle for tea by pouring diesel into a box of sand and then lighting the sand and holding the kettle above the flames. You could use the diesel/petrol to clean oily/greasy things.

I actually did a couple of basic cybersecurity certifications.

Well done to you! :)

Thank you. I'm really happy that you got something from the post. :) I love coding too. I love the way you can solve problems in the real world by typing stuff in an editor of one kind or another! The best thing about the company that I am working for is that the people come from every sort of background you can think of. Some were chefs, for example. Only a few of them have computer science degrees. I worked in an industry that had nothing to do with technology. Although I am the oldest by far, no one has been negative about my age as yet and I doubt they ever will be.

i'm really glad you liked the post :)

If it helps I am 60 and have just got my first ever junior developer role. I did the Odin project, a free course.

You start off slow but then you get quicker. Same as learning anything. I'm 60. A few weeks ago I got my first ever job as a junior developer. Up until then I had been working in a role that has almost nothing to do with technology, certainly zero to do with coding.

Not checking in but security at London City airport in 2015. I'm a non-gay male and the security man put his fingers down the back of my trousers and deeply between my cheeks. It was in broad daylight and in a packed airport.

It becomes exhausting talking to people like you. You are a part of the problem because, it seems, you don't believe the experiences of others. I get the impression that whatever I write here will not be believed, despite me not having lied at all. That is part of the problem.

Where have I lied?

Because this is my country. I feel British. That's not to say I simply like beef and Yorkshire pud or that I admire the royal family (which I don't). I speak (and write) English well and sound like an English person from the southeast. I don't feel as if I am from any other country. You wouldn't be able to tell me apart from a white British person on the phone. In fact I know no other language so well as English. I can speak French and passable Spanish but not the language of my parents, who came to Britain from a Commonwealth country. To ask me why I am still here is a question only asked to non-White British citizens when we complain about ill treatment. It is what Nick Ferrari of LBC asked Afua Hirsch. He asked her in a hateful way why she doesn't go away if she doesn't like the way that she is treated. To ask people like me why I am still here is to ask us to put up with ill treatment or f\*ck off somewhere else. But this is my country too and I don't want to be treated like a second-class citizen in it. People who question why we are still here want us, non-white British citizens, to either put up with being treated badly or go away.

I have no words of solace, so feel free to criticise me. I do have words that have meaning. The weirdness of human existence is that we know we will die and don't like the idea. An extension of that is that we don't like the idea of other people dying, especially those who are close to us. Evolution has made us into beings that fear death. Our genes make us feel that fear because that increases the likelihood of the existence those same genes down the generations. There is no comfort to be had in the death of a love one, we just have to learn to deal with it. Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The Selfish Gene, which, among his other writings shows us that our genes use us to perpetuate themselves. It's not the other way around. There is no evidence to suggest that when we die our lives continue in another way. It seems as if we simply stop existing. That is as true for you as it was for your mother. We simply have to bear the pain of knowing that a loved one has died and that we will never see that person again. But that is what human life is. We are only in existence for a short amount of time. That is as true as it was for your mother as it is for you. The norm is non-existence. There was time immemorial before you came into being. There will be eternity after your death. Just try to enjoy your life while you have it. Wishing you well.

Studies have shown that if your name is not one that people think is white you have to send many more CVs that people who are white English/Welsh/Scottish have to to get a job. It doesn't actually matter if you are not British or if you are a British citizen. In the United Kingdom if you have a name that is not seemingly English/Welsh/Scottish you will find it harder to find work. And even when you get a job you will, like me, find that companies are more ready to promote ignorant and incompetent white people over people who have non-white skin.

the chavs are horrible. and there is so many of them.

As a non-white British citizen I can relate to what you have written. The racism in England is real and will probably never go away now because it is so entrenched. As someone who has experienced several other cultures from an early age I came to the conclusion many years ago that the majority in Britain are self-important and entitled.

This is fascinating. Out of interest, do you ever find it hard to understand what your Geordie husband is saying? I ask because I have relatives who are Americans (US citizens) who say that they cannot understand a word that people from Newcastle and the surrounding regions say.

This is a great description of people in Britain.