Scottish Politics / Independence - Vol 12

This^. So much this. Prime opportunity for a decent number of technical apprenticeships that could have been a big long term benefit to the country as a whole by increasing the pool of skilled workers that would have been a good fit for a number of industries for many years to come.

Instead we get the same st different day. Same happened with the new Forth crossing and knowing the skill sets of a number of those working on it i suspect the quality will be found wanting in the long run as well. Some of the things i have heard from people that worked on it i wouldn't repeat on here, but as i have said before i doubt it will last as long as the old Bridge.

Industrial ceramics...was that CoorsTek in Glenrothes, I was offered a Quality Inspector job there a few years ago, the salary was laughable, they made some nice kit...I remember seeing ceramic platters for Rega Turntables.

Oh dear. Seems giving the job to not so honest John was not the easy win the SNP hoped for. New poll puts Labour 10 pts ahead and would leave SNP with 11 Westminster seats. Wait until I get my very small violin to play.

" The polling - carried out for the Times and taken between 13-17 May - has Labour’s Westminster vote share at 39%, up five points from late April.
The SNP is now on 29%.
Elsewhere, the Tories are on 12%, the Lib Dems on 8% and Reform UK on 4%
The Greens are up three points since the ending of the Bute House Agreement, up to 7%. "



https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24333290.labou...

Who are the 7% looonies voting Green though?!!!!!!

The Green parliamentary group celebrates the poll result.

The person on the right initiated the sacking that led to Adams' tribunal.

(Apparently Sturgeon refused their advanced when she discovered they had a penis.... allegedly.)

Full coverage of the many shocking actions of Nicola's pal in relation to this tribunal case at Wings.

https://wingsoverscotland.com/man-at-work/#more-14...

Another Sturgeon take down in the Speccy. Where were all these journos when she had her hands in the controls destroying Scotland though?

"Most of us learn to get what we want by engaging with the rest of the world. Despite her bizarre reputation as a good politician – or at least good at winning elections for a while, which is the most a politician can hope for – Sturgeon remains arrogant and contemptuous."

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-sad-truth-...

Yes. Much pleasure will be had between now and the election. As the current crop of SNP MPs realise that Notsohonest John won't save them. Much infighting to get on the lists for Holyrood and for any cosy quango jobs that come up.

A textbook case of Schadenfreude

For a party that has been in government for 17 years, is in total disarray and has several senior members either under investigation or awaiting trial and is on its 3rd leader in just over a year, it’s a remarkable performance. This would be like Sunak being in a worse position than he is but somehow being able to scrape a hung parliament rather than the landslide Starmer is expected to get.

What the fk is wrong with the Scottish electorate?

Yep, that's the one though it used to be two separate companies. VZS was the technical ceramics company and Coorstek was the substrate business (my wife ran the laser department until it closed a couple of years back). From what i hear the inspector i knew retired then they gave someone that worked there the job and once they had completed their training they left for a better paid inspection role elsewhere so they had obviously cut the salary. Coors bought VZS and it was going fine until the crash in 2008. We had just done a ton of monolithic pressure sensors for customer samples and had them approved and were doing good numbers of them for one customer already.

They had a choice of investing in some new equipment to up capacity (i had already been to Germany to speak to equipment manufacturers) that would have seen us as the market leader with big volumes as no one else could make them at the time (all the big technical ceramic manufacturers had said they couldn't be made, worst thing ever to tell us something couldn't be done, the motto the bloke that i trained under and myself had was "often stuck, never beat") and we had it down to a fine art. Reason being pre Coorstek we were a small company with no restraints on what we could and couldn't try and unlike say the Germans we didn't have technical colleges/university training so had no idea ourselves of what the theory constraints were so just kept pushing on stuff others wouldn't even try. I got to play around with material blends as we milled the raw material to our own specs, learnt a load from our ceramicist that helped me tweak blends for individual jobs, got to design tools/rigs and modify machines to suit and did all the maintenance up to full rebuilds. Best job i ever had and the Directors at VZS that owned the company after a management buyout were the best i have ever worked under.

Instead they st the bed, shut down all expenditure and laid people off. The new manager they sent from the States was a clueless manage by numbers type with no knowledge of the business and was pissing me off to the degree that i had to leave or end up in big trouble. A few years after i left my old department was back down to the same numbers it was doing when i started, an order of magnitude less. Sad to see and i felt for my old colleagues as it was a great place to work prior to that.

As usual the big company thought they knew best, despite us proving on numerous occasions that they didn't. Everything we made we did better than them, out the kiln our stuff usually had millimetres less grind stock which for anyone that has ever ground ceramic will know is hours less work and thousands of pounds less spent on diamond grinding tools every year.

The first manager we had from the States we had was a great bloke that had worked himself up from the shop floor so he knew the difference between the bullstters and people that could actually do stuff. He asked me to look at a project they had been running in the States for over a year. They had made a million components with a 60% out of spec rate and were storing what was essentially scrap in the hope that in the future they could be used in an application with a slacker tolerance ! That blew my mind. He asked if we could make them so we took it on.

Designed a tool to go in one of our machines in an afternoon, tool got made in 8 weeks by the best manufacturer of carbide tooling there has ever been in the UK ,Parkside Tool and Die, also sadly gone (no one will argue they weren't , we went to other companies that were doing stuff for aerospace, F1 etc and NONE of them could touch Parkside ability wise, neither could any of the powdered metal tooling lot, that's a piece of piss in comparison to ceramics as the tooling is generally steel, though much bigger bangs if you screw up) and had samples to spec to the customer the same week the tool came. Think out of the first half million we made we had maybe 250 scrap parts at grinding. The manager was delighted but on a subsequent visit from people that appeared to be involved with the project on the American side it was clear a few noses had been put out of joint.

With the cost of energy these days it would be a struggle for any UK company to compete globally i think. I have been out of the Industry for a while (tried to stay in it by getting a job overseas but hated being away from my family) and i have lost touch with my old boss that went on to work for a capital equipment manufacturer so ended up in most of the significant plants around the world, so no longer get up to date news on what's happening where.

Sorry for the long reply, went of a bit or a rambling reminisce there