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Caveat Lector pointed me at this article. This bit jumped out at me early on in the document

Highly skilled jobs remain, and pay well, because basic design, prototyping and pilot production will still be done here, but even if you have skills, there are problems getting hired. Human Resources departments haven’t one clue in Hell how to evaluate skilled technical workers. They try to match exact experience and training to exact job requirements, and demand 3 years experience for specialties that have only existed for 18 months. Thousands of technical jobs go unfilled, while thousands who could do those jobs are asking, “Do you want fries with that?”.

If you’re over 40, the technology employment picture becomes really grim. You have abilities far beyond a 28 year old’s, but he’s the one that’s going to get hired. For over 40s, there are many opportunities in consulting, especially in small and medium business, but that takes social skills and above all, selling skills, exactly what many chose technical careers to avoid.

So what does all this mean to the small business manager? Simple – whether you’re looking for a consultant or an employee, you have a large pool of experienced over 40 technology workers to choose from, and you won’t have to compete tooth and nail with corporate employers. Look for a track record of flexibility, and let the corps pay for the young ones’ experience.

Having turned 40 a couple of years back, I can confirm the job market is tough.

The real meat of the article, though, is it’s scathing attack on Micro$oft, and their future plans, especially the way they’re rewriting windows allowing it to reconfigure or disable things the moment you do anything the Micro$oft doesn’t like. I certainly don’t like the way they’re moving from a licence model to a subscription model, so if you don’t pay your subscription, it will lock up your data. This will give them the power to extort as much money from their ‘customers’ as they can, because if their victims don’t pay up, M$ will put them out of business.

Of course, some of this may be exaggeration. But if it’s true, this is scary stuff.

Following on from proposed GDR theme park, Mark Steyn in the Daily Telegraph has more ideas, starting with “PilgerWorld” and ending up with things like this:

“Ah,” she said, “you’ll be wanting Legoverland.” It sounded appealing enough – “Relive the glory days of the 1980s and 1990s, when the Tories were in the sack instead of getting it. It’s back to bonktastic basics at the fun-filled theme-park where you’ll soon be spending more time with your family!” But the picture of David Mellor on the front made me feel faintly queasy.

I never understood what all those women saw in David Mellor. Make Steyn saves the best one till last.

As I left, I bumped into Ken Livingstone: “Take an amazing trip back in time to Olde London,” he said, “and re-discover a lost world where traffic speeds get into double figures. Admission £5.”

(Registration may be required. Link from Sasha Castel)

So the Germans have no sense of humour? So goes the stereotype, but this story about the proposed Communist Theme Park suggests the stereotype is off the mark. (Link from Samizdata.net).

Massine Productions GmbH hopes to recreate a 10,000-square metre (107,600 sq ft) replica of East Germany, complete with surly border guards, rigorous customs inspections, authentic East German mark notes, and restaurants with regulation bland East German food.

I suppose shooting anyone who tries to leave, as suggested by one of the Samizdata commenters would be taking realism a bit to far. What next? Package tours to North Korea?

I see via Scott that the Blogosphere has discovered the sick and evil individual Fred Phelps.

When somebody posted the URL of his virulently homophobic Westboro Baptist Church to the message boards of Pyramid Online, a few months back, I assumed it was a hoax site created to discredit lunatic-fringe fundamentalism. Sadly, I was wrong – the Anti-Defamation League shows that the site is ‘for real’. Addicted to Hate gives a long background story; a nasty story of violence, wife-beating and child abuse, in which ‘Pastor’ Fred Phelps proves to in the same realm of evil as Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin; all he’s lacked is the ability to practice his evil on a large enough scale.

Warning! Do not visit any of the above sites if you are easily offended. True evil is neither funny nor entertaining.

I’ve been a naughty person today. I said “Bollocks” to a Jehovah’s Witness.

He was giving me the standard speil about how the world was getting worse and worse, how crime was rising and the threat of terrorism was increasing. I cut him off before he reached the conclusion that this was proof that the ‘End Times’ were upon us.

I pointed out that, worrying though the threat of terrorism might be, it’s nothing compared with the horrors of World War II. How many million died in that conflict? And isn’t crime actually falling?

People, especially older generations, have claimed society has been declining throughout all ages. Wasn’t there a clay tablet dug up in Assyria from 2000 BC that read like a Daily Mail editorial?

I’ve read a couple of theories as to why conservative-minded people think like this. One is that children are shielded by their parents from the darker things of life; my parents were children during World War two, and I’m sure they were too young to realise the full horror of what was going on around them. Because children are shielded from things, when they get older some of them idealise the times of their childhood as an imaginary ‘golden age’.

The other theory is that the 1950s were a historical aberration, and really did have atypically low levels of crime and disorder, probably a consequence of a significant percentage of people at the more violent end of the bell-curve getting themselves killed in the war.

Or maybe it’s just a consequence of wider reporting of wars and tragedies by the media. Two hundred years ago we’d never have heard of events like the genocide in Rwanda. Probably fifty years ago it wouldn’t have the same level of reporting. And in the days before the Internet it would never have occurred to me that anyone I know might have been killed in the Rhode Island fire.

While I’m a Christian, I don’t believe in the literal “End Times” in the way that Jehovah’s Witnesses and other fundamentalist sects do. As far as I’m concerned the Book of Revelation is very specific to the times when it was written, and “666″ probably refers to the Emperor Nero. I certainly don’t believe the coming Gulf War II is the precursor to Armageddon.

Just when the folks at Samizdata.net are in danger of looking sensible, one of them posts this, just to remind us of the fact that they are complete wingnuts.

so taking my money is not just theft, it is an assault on civilisation itself, and I have no objection to using violence to defend it. I am all in favour of shooting burglars that a home owner finds in their house, so my views on tax collectors and the people who sent them (i.e. anyone who legitimises what they do) should not be hard to figure out. The only reason I am not out shooting people and putting bombs in cars is a purely utilitarian cost/benefit analysis that it is not the most effective way to secure my liberty and the liberty of others.

Dolly the cloned sheep has died. Probably the most famous sheep in the world (can you name any other sheep?), and responsible for a delay in the publication of GURPS BioTech.

Tom Coates of plasticbag.org attacks the ill-informed anti-European predjudices expressed recently by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. As one commenter notes, Tom Coates has probably spent much more time analysing that piece of nonsense that the original author spent scribbling it.

I find something worrying about many American conservatives, including some bloggers. Perhaps it’s a consequence of the disarray of the American left, but there’s a level of puffed-up self-confidence bordering on hubris; a refusal to consider that any of their ideas could or should be questioned, the idea that anyone that disagrees with them is an ‘idiotarian’. And when it comes to the issue of war on Iraq, well, as Tom Coates says in his addendum:

This article has been discussed by a wide variety of different sites from all sides of the political spectrum. I want to openly deny at this stage an allegiance with either the pro or anti-war lobbies. I have yet to fully make up my mind about the need, the expediency, the pragamatics or the morality of a potential conflict. What I have made up my mind about is that it’s too bloody serious an issue to let people sloganeer, to have individuals try and shut down necessary debate or to dismiss opposing viewpoints as the products of selfish, diseased or un-Christian degenerates. Thousands of people are likely to be killed as a result of this action – it’s immoral not to agonise over whether it’s the right decision or not.

The Charity Commission have finally succeeded in ousting Sheikh Abu Hamza from the Finsbury Park mosque in London. Whatever you opinions on freedom of speech, this guy has been shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre for months, if not years. For instance, he had this to say about the Columbia shuttle disaster:

He said the crew had been punished with death by Allah because there was an Israeli – Ilan Ramon, an Indian-born Hindu – Kalpana Chawla, and Americans on board.

Sometimes I wonder why our government has tolerated this man for so long. Maybe they were afraid of inflaming the moslem community in Britain, and waited until just about every mainstream moslem in Britain has disowned him. For example:

Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, leader of the Muslim Parliament, dismissed Mr Hamza’s pronouncement as “lunatic”.

Dr Siddiqui told BBC News Online all British Muslims would be feeling sympathy for the dead astronauts, who had given their lives in the pursuit of sciences.

Of course, all Hamza achieves is to encourage an anti moslem backlask. It’s long overdue to deport this nutjob (who’s not a UK citizen). That’s assuming we can find a single country in the world that would accept him.