OK, I'm watching the cricket...
... eek, tense... but I'm also reading careers guides again and getting uneasy as usual.
I think one reason why I can't get on with - or can't imagine getting on with - and can't understand these big Graduate Employers is that they're not grounded in anything concrete, anything - to me - tangible. Perhaps you have to be brought up in their kind of world - maybe private schools prepare people for this kind of world, or having parents who inhabit it themselves?
Anyway it seems to me that all these financial, consulting, management firms etc. aren't even tertiary industry; they're parasitic upon it; they're so far up in the clouds, an artificial world of bizarre artificial language just as much as the world of Tolkien. If I'm going to eschew the Real World I think I'd rather it was for academia than for a nasty faceless world of profit. One company advert I just read actually mentioned some award they got for having the clients with the fastest growing profits. I'd've been more impressed by a company making a point of the fact that such things aren't for them...
Think I'll take a look at the CV; after all if I'm depending for my own sanity on having a life that at least looks good on paper, it'd better look good on paper...
---
[ramble]
Incidentally, on the subject of SUVs (of course), I do kind of agree that, if for example a CR-V suits a family's lifestyle, they should be allowed to drive one. By current standards it's in the environmental mid-range (and the diesel version's probably rather better), and is one of the safer cars for your children to be run over by. Plus with the state of our roads, I quite sympathise with wanting something a little more rugged than a Focus. All well and good. But I just don't see why cars like the X5, M-class, Range Rover, Q7, Range Rover Sport, Cayenne (eugh, I ought to wash my keyboard just for typing it) need exist. How many owners honestly do have a horse-trailer, dogs, kids, muddy gardening stuff, lots of furniture to lug around, and a rough farm track they have to drive along? It's the conspicuous display of wealth and the "two fingers to the rest of us" sort of attitude that really exercises me...
... anyway, leaving behind the Dark Side, a hybrid update:
In the UK you can currently buy a Honda Insight (used), Honda Civic IMA, Toyota Prius, Lexus RX400h, and soon the Lexus GS450h. (Incidentally there won't be a hybrid version of the new Lexus IS, but there will be a diesel - and frankly in the short term, diesel may be the better option for most people. They really are getting quite efficient). But why aren't we being offered some of the other hybrids available in the US? Especially the ones that are based on cars that are sold here anyway, like the Honda Accord and Ford Escape (Maverick).
... actually I think I can explain this. Firstly, America doesn't 'do' diesels so hybrids are more urgent there than here as an alternative to petrol, especially as they don't really 'do' small petrol engines either. Secondly, recent hybrids are being marketed - like the RX400h - as primarily a way of getting more power for the same economy, not more economy for the same power. So they might, say, be as fast as a 3.0-litre with the economy of a 2.0-litre, but that's really not economical enough and most people don't need the power of a 3.0-litre. So we are in fact better off, environmentally, with the really really excellent Accord diesel than an Accord hybrid. Thirdly, a quick google suggests that the US Accord is a different car to the UK Accord (I think it always has been - in the 90s the UK Coupé and Aerodeck versions were based on the US Accord and were conspicuously different to the UK saloon).
... but I still think we should get the Ford Escape hybrid here. We know the British like their SUVs, and as with the RX400h there's surely an argument for "if you can't beat them, make them more efficient" - if you can't break the SUV habit, at least get a more economical one. The Maverick isn't a very big seller at all in the UK, surely partly because it's only available with petrol engines. It shouldn't cost Ford too much, I'd hope, to put the hybrid drivetrain into a right-hand-drive vehicle and then they have something they can market in Britain. Not to mention of course that they can charge much, much more here than in the US (I think a Prius is about $20,000 in the US, or about £20,000 in the UK, i.e. almost twice as much. This, of course, is unfair but another story...)
Anyway. I end with a favourite Family Guy quote which seems appropriate if you've just read all that rubbish...
---
Check this out; I'd like to know how US prices compare, though!
---
Don't see that I'll ever be able to decide on a career or what have you, unless I get some kind of insight into what these things are about; I guess the best thing would be for some of my friends to get careers and me to go round and visit them and see how they live... hehe. It's all very well to say "well, no decision's forever" but frankly the amount of effort and time it would take me to get a job, I'd want it to be something I really wanted to do and didn't convert me into a mindless capitalist zombie...
I think one reason why I can't get on with - or can't imagine getting on with - and can't understand these big Graduate Employers is that they're not grounded in anything concrete, anything - to me - tangible. Perhaps you have to be brought up in their kind of world - maybe private schools prepare people for this kind of world, or having parents who inhabit it themselves?
Anyway it seems to me that all these financial, consulting, management firms etc. aren't even tertiary industry; they're parasitic upon it; they're so far up in the clouds, an artificial world of bizarre artificial language just as much as the world of Tolkien. If I'm going to eschew the Real World I think I'd rather it was for academia than for a nasty faceless world of profit. One company advert I just read actually mentioned some award they got for having the clients with the fastest growing profits. I'd've been more impressed by a company making a point of the fact that such things aren't for them...
Think I'll take a look at the CV; after all if I'm depending for my own sanity on having a life that at least looks good on paper, it'd better look good on paper...
---
[ramble]
Incidentally, on the subject of SUVs (of course), I do kind of agree that, if for example a CR-V suits a family's lifestyle, they should be allowed to drive one. By current standards it's in the environmental mid-range (and the diesel version's probably rather better), and is one of the safer cars for your children to be run over by. Plus with the state of our roads, I quite sympathise with wanting something a little more rugged than a Focus. All well and good. But I just don't see why cars like the X5, M-class, Range Rover, Q7, Range Rover Sport, Cayenne (eugh, I ought to wash my keyboard just for typing it) need exist. How many owners honestly do have a horse-trailer, dogs, kids, muddy gardening stuff, lots of furniture to lug around, and a rough farm track they have to drive along? It's the conspicuous display of wealth and the "two fingers to the rest of us" sort of attitude that really exercises me...
... anyway, leaving behind the Dark Side, a hybrid update:
In the UK you can currently buy a Honda Insight (used), Honda Civic IMA, Toyota Prius, Lexus RX400h, and soon the Lexus GS450h. (Incidentally there won't be a hybrid version of the new Lexus IS, but there will be a diesel - and frankly in the short term, diesel may be the better option for most people. They really are getting quite efficient). But why aren't we being offered some of the other hybrids available in the US? Especially the ones that are based on cars that are sold here anyway, like the Honda Accord and Ford Escape (Maverick).
... actually I think I can explain this. Firstly, America doesn't 'do' diesels so hybrids are more urgent there than here as an alternative to petrol, especially as they don't really 'do' small petrol engines either. Secondly, recent hybrids are being marketed - like the RX400h - as primarily a way of getting more power for the same economy, not more economy for the same power. So they might, say, be as fast as a 3.0-litre with the economy of a 2.0-litre, but that's really not economical enough and most people don't need the power of a 3.0-litre. So we are in fact better off, environmentally, with the really really excellent Accord diesel than an Accord hybrid. Thirdly, a quick google suggests that the US Accord is a different car to the UK Accord (I think it always has been - in the 90s the UK Coupé and Aerodeck versions were based on the US Accord and were conspicuously different to the UK saloon).
... but I still think we should get the Ford Escape hybrid here. We know the British like their SUVs, and as with the RX400h there's surely an argument for "if you can't beat them, make them more efficient" - if you can't break the SUV habit, at least get a more economical one. The Maverick isn't a very big seller at all in the UK, surely partly because it's only available with petrol engines. It shouldn't cost Ford too much, I'd hope, to put the hybrid drivetrain into a right-hand-drive vehicle and then they have something they can market in Britain. Not to mention of course that they can charge much, much more here than in the US (I think a Prius is about $20,000 in the US, or about £20,000 in the UK, i.e. almost twice as much. This, of course, is unfair but another story...)
Anyway. I end with a favourite Family Guy quote which seems appropriate if you've just read all that rubbish...
Do you even listen to yourself when you talk? / Ah, I drift in an and out.[/ramble]
---
Check this out; I'd like to know how US prices compare, though!
---
Don't see that I'll ever be able to decide on a career or what have you, unless I get some kind of insight into what these things are about; I guess the best thing would be for some of my friends to get careers and me to go round and visit them and see how they live... hehe. It's all very well to say "well, no decision's forever" but frankly the amount of effort and time it would take me to get a job, I'd want it to be something I really wanted to do and didn't convert me into a mindless capitalist zombie...
posted by Z31 at 11:44 am
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