Regarding the reflexive plasticity of the labour market / gay shower scene

Our mate Steve recently had to put up with a work colleague's five minute rant about how all these Poles should be sent back to their own country and stop coming over here and stealing our jobs.

People see the job market as a zero-sum game. It's a common myth that one job position being taken results in one fewer jobs out of a finite number available. It's not true. Taking one position can create one or more other jobs.

Here's an example. You apply for a job but you get turned down, because you are manifestly an idle bastard and your C.V. is a work of baroque fiction. The job goes to someone else, who for the sake of argument, we shall say is Polish. The department she works for benefits greatly from her hard work, becoming more efficient and so the company decides to expand it, creating five new positions. Had a less dilligent worker filled the position, the company could have just slugged along as usual. The Polish worker just expanded the labour market. Try and be grateful.

This should be bloody obvious, but apparently not. Write it on a piece of paper and pin it on your co-workers face, Steve.

We are living in a climate of fear. People, to some extent understandably, fear what they don't know. Rapid societal change can be worrying for people. The fact is, Polish workers aren't claiming benefits. The UK labour market needs them. They are doing jobs that British born people don't want to do, or are not qualified to do. It reflects the fact that the government has left a whole generation of non-academically minded people untrained because they were rushed into university to do pointless degrees instead of learning a trade.

Last saturday night at Tony's house I watched Tango and Cash. Tango and Cash is the gayest film ever made. An execrable piece of buddy trash, it's hard to believe that the film makers weren't having a private giggle at goading the witless Sylvester Stallone into playing a flaming homosexual. Stallone is supposed to be the urbane, intellectual straight-man to Kurt Russel's bad boy maverick cop. Witness Stallone's odd, high-pitched accent as he battles with the limitations of his monotone voicebox. His lips move only for the words to flop out several seconds too late, like dead fish from a keep-net. They clearly overdubbed some of the more complicated bits. When I say this film is gay I mean it in the true sense. As Ruthless Reviews says, "Not only do Russell and Stallone shower together at one point, but they look at each other's cocks while naked. And then talk about each other's cocks. We see both of their asses for way too long. It is really inexplicable." I am glad I watched Tango and Cash. As one commentator on a torrent forum said, "It's a good film for people who like to drink in the daytime. I'm drunk right now".

Current reading

Gulag: A History - Anne Appelbaum
Britain BC - Francis Pryor
London: A Short History - A.N. Wilson
The Diversions Of Purley - Peter Ackroyd
The Undercover Economist - Tim Harford
Dark Water - Koji Suzuki