Being interviewed for a job has changed, not just over the last decade but over the last thirty months. What lands you a job with one company will get you shown the door at another. How modern high-tech business bosses see a potential colleague is quite different from what a traditional employer in a long-established…
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Stephen Hawking Ability to adapt is the reason the human race has developed ahead of other life species. For most of its history humanity has been able to change slowly. The pace has increased from somewhat lugubrious to hysterically frenetic in just my lifetime. Now it is in danger of getting so out of control…
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“Don’t refer to people as servants”, someone said to me the other day. When I asked why he added “They don’t like it”. Words mean what we want them to. Some people use expletives of a particularly vulgar and, to my way of thinking, insensitive nature with monotonous regularity. Others turn perfectly ordinary, inoffensive words…
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It’s probably less than a week since you last heard that tiresome political accusation “Too little, too late”. It fits the politicians’ dictionary perfectly, being hardly disputable and totally unmeasurable. As always, whether political or not, a leader caught with his dictionary round his ankles, can resort to this vague criticism of others with little…
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People find all sorts of words to avoid saying ‘firing’ or ‘downsizing’. “Letting go” must be one of the most insulting, with its implication of the people being shunted struggling to escape from the clutches of their incomes. Disney, handing the exit card to some 7,000 people – said to be about 3% of their…
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Politicians have a curious idea that what they have ever said they must always maintain to be right. The rest of us are mortal. We know that we make mistakes, screw up, get it wrong from time to time. Indeed, if we have any guts (= initiative), we expect to get it wrong sometimes. ‘Win…
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Fifty percent of marriages now end in divorce. There are lots of reasons. Longer life is one, easier separation, another. Decline in the religious belief of a lifetime partnership is high on the list. Adultery still accounts for the breakdown of trust; boredom must figure there, too. People grow and change. There is often less…
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It was only on our second visit to the Berlin Philharmonic that I had curiosity and time to think about why they played better than any other orchestra I had heard. My first evening with them had blown me away. The tough and touching beauty of the music was enough to make me feel physically…
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When you answer a series of menus and get left hanging for an hour or two to speak to someone at, say, the bank you are working. The bank could have had people ready at each branch of the journey to deal quickly with your question. But that would have cost them money. Why should…
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The thoughts in today’s DP were generated, without the aid of AI, by Hugh Mason, myself and two large whiskies What is the quality of ChatGPT, the recent development of Generative Artificial Intelligence? I asked my friend Hugh Mason who is always up-to-date with technological advances. His response was “ChatGPT very effectively mines what’s already…
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