Do you think authority as expressed in capitalist/profit-seeking workplaces is indistinguishable from other types of organisation?

Because in my experience, yes, there are some similarities, but the way authority is exercised is pretty different.

Now now, we're only 1 year into our decade of national renewal.

my brain is now rewriting the words of hotel california around Prometheus's torment. thanks, thanks very much

This is the problem with Ed Davey's main attack line since July 2024: 'don't let Trump's America become Farage's Britain'.

The reticence to criticise Labour has to stop when the Home Secretary is reportedly taking direct inspiration from Kristi Noem and the NHS is undergoing Operation Chainsaw.

The country's supposed liberal party hasn't got the guts to straightforwardly and loudly condemn the most evil authoritarian proposals ever put forward by a UK government.

They're not 'mean-spirited'. They're evil, dangerous, callous, disgusting.

Weak, weak, weak.

A short answer: there's an accountancy wheeze between councils and government where we all collectively pretend these deficits don't exist and they can be kept off main balance sheets.

Without this wheeze councils would go bust overnight. It's just been extended to 2027/28.

The Lib Dems have policies spilling out of every party nook and cranny, and their conference policy debates are often full of detail and data.

None of that is reaching the public. The Lib Dems haven't sold a big policy idea on any of their preferred political areas for decades.

We can't fully get away from the fact that jobs attract people who have relevant qualifications, skills and interests, and that in a society where opportunity is not equal, that will result in some biases.

What's your alternative to this type of job application (CV/cover letter)?

You've lost me, I'm afraid.

Yes, that's what 'approximate' means. It isn't perfect. But it is quite obviously better than what came before it, and what is likely to come after it, which is a return to hiring via personal networks, preferment, biases and patronage.

It's imperfect, sure. But it's considerably better than only hiring from people already known to the organisation, which is why we collectively invented a formalised system for job applications.

Hiring has to involve judgement and rejection at some stage. Better to approximate a common standard.

Yes, most of the cover letter problem comes from the lack of time and attention on the recruiter side. Something that will now be 'solved' by machines reading machine-written letters instead.

Without the (imperfect) systems we have developed with the aim of giving people a fair crack at applying for a job, we will collectively fall back on pre-technological methods of communication. These favour existing power networks, inbuilt biases, and snap judgements.

Agree to disagree - the point I was making was the opposite, that writing a good cover letter is actually a hard skill and most people can't do it. LLMs are unlikely to improve that in my view: they are just enabling a greater quantity of crap.

They are a useful way of narrowing down candidates to those who appear paper-qualified, have read the job description and done some research about the recruiting company, and appear to be enthused about the chance of working there.

In my experience max 5% of cover letters do this.

This approach also may have explanatory power for the popularity of image-heavy slide decks in corporate culture. People look at the image and guess what the point of the slide is.