Ummm

I got a viewing of a flashy black Tesla Model X SUV yesterday, complete with what Tesla are pleased to call falcon wing doors, fully extended. Bing suggests that such a thing might cost you £90,000, roughly nine times what we paid for our Ford. On the other hand, apart from the silly doors, you have a state of the art entertainment system to amuse you on the road and the top speed is said to be around 150mph, handy for popping around the M25 from Epsom to Heathrow.

To my mind, a bit rum, given the state that the world is in, that we should be building and buying such things. Is it any wonder that quite a lot of people in other parts of the world think that we in the west have gone badly wrong, have taken the wrong road? While, at the same time, quite a lot of other people are risking life and limb to join in, to try for a slice of western pie. Nowt as queer as folk, as they say up north.

And while we are on rum, a bit rum that around 9% of our young men are economically inactive, that is to say between the ages of 18 and 24, not being educated, not working and not looking for work. Is is video games, selling drugs, stealing cars, mental health or lack of decent employment? While young women, some of whom might well have preferred to stay at home to mind their children, are getting more active. A lot of them, probably, in low paid work that young men do not care for. Perhaps care work. See reference 5 - which closes with a plea to return to the (publicly funded) employment exchanges of old. Very lefty of them. One can also go to ONS at reference 6, who look to know all about it, although I did not, in the few seconds I gave to the search, come up with a graphic as neat as that above.

PS: Microsoft are fully awake, are on my case. Following yesterday's post which features a Treehouse hotel, advertisements for same have already started feeding through into references 1 and 2. Along with the rather more modestly priced Sykes Holidays, the people who take us to Dartmoor.

References

Reference 1: https://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/tesla-model-x-762bhp-7-seat-electric-gullwing-suv.

Reference 2: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/otherworldly-tesla-model-3-electrifies-consumer-reports-top-10-2021/.

Reference 3: https://www.tesla.com/. A very glossy website, particularly for the more expensive models, but I couldn't find anything about falcon wing or gull wing doors.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/03/tesla-comes-to-town.html. Tesla arrived in our bit of Epsom more than three years ago. And this one is still there, as glossy as new.

Reference 5: Young men are slipping quietly through the economy’s cracks: A positive employment trend for young women masks a rise in the proportion of inactive young men - Sarah O'Connor, Financial Times - 2022. 28th June.

Reference 6: https://www.ons.gov.uk/.