TRASHFUTURE - PREVIEW: Ocean’s Apprenticeship feat. Devon

Episode Date: December 30, 2019

In a preview of this week's bonus, we’re reviewing a startup called WhiteHat, digesting a terrible Giles Coren wankfest about Oxford admissions, and—most importantly—speaking to friend of the show and biology teacher Devon (@Devon_OnEarth) about the state-mandated ‘British Values’ education. Spoiler alert: it’s inchoate and weird! If you want to hear the whole thing, get it on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/32642200 *COME SEE MILO* If you want to catch Milo’s stand-up on tour, get tickets here: https://linktr.ee/miloontour  

So, basically, the apprenticeship levy is paid by all businesses that earn over a certain amount, and there's going to be a music queue coming up in a moment. But it's an extra payroll tax that businesses pay, and if they hire on apprentices rather than graduates, they can then get it paid back to them and kind of have a free employee. And so, just as an experiment, I'm now going to ask Nate to please play the theme of Oceans 11 quietly, whilst I explain how this startup explains the university, explains the apprenticeship scheme, and it's going to sound like I'm describing an elaborate crime. Will the government pay for my apprenticeship scheme?

The short answer is yes. The apprenticeship levy works like an additional payroll tax, set at 0.5% for an employer's annual pay bill, the levy applies to employers with a presence in the UK AND an annual pay bill of more than £3 million. Your pay bill is based on the amount of earnings subject to a national insurance contribution, so in a nutshell, any person who is on your payroll and paid through TAYE is included in your pay bill. When you spend an apprenticeship training in England, the government will apply a 10%

top-up to your levy account every month, but at the same time those funds enter your digital account, so for every £1 that enters your digital account to spend on apprenticeship training, you get £1.10. Some employees may find that the funds in their digital account aren't enough to cover the full cost of training all of these apprentices they want to bring on board, and in those cases the government will contribute 90% of the total cost of the additional delivery. Sounds too good to be true, right? To be honest, there's one catch.

Funds expire 24 months after they enter your digital account, so spend them on apprenticeship training. Either lose it or use it, gentlemen. Just assailing down to the skills wallets. You know what this is? This is work fair, again, but it's learnt how to code. The only word I added was gentlemen at the very end. Everything else was as written on the start-up site.

It's free money, they're just giving it away. Incredible. And I fully stand by my thesis that over-complicated government programs like this designed to subsidize certain business activities, if you explain them over the Ocean's 11 theme, sound like a heist. You just, yeah. The government arrives at your front door with a giant comical check from Publisher's Clearinghouse.

You have to sign it today, otherwise. And there's three guys out the back in a van watching a fucking video feed. The government goes into Al Pacino's Casino, and it's just like, we're going to find your apprenticeships, and there's very little you can do to stop us. A Chinese guy climbing through the letterbox of a WeWork for some reason. That comes up, Milo. Oh, fucking hell. Well, that specifically.

Okay, no, but WeWork does play into the next part of this story, and here's the fact the last part of this story. So this is one of their headline partnerships, and this is from Wired magazine. This is the prestige part. This actually isn't even the prestige part, this is the turn, and the prestige comes in a few minutes. British start-up White Hat has now signed a deal with Flatiron, a coding school backed by WeWork.

Not the steak place. The aim? Disambiguation. To finally make apprenticeships work in the UK and help to fill the digital skills gap. Finally make the... Yeah, no, they've never been apprentices in the UK before, it's not like all tradespeople did them. Yeah, it's not as though the economy changed around us, and the apprenticeship model is

no longer very good. The White Hat is just a flat cap for some reason. What's like a hip-hop flat cap? Now, I'd like to have everybody hold the lyric, start it from the bottom, now we're here in your mind. If you're listening to it, hold that in your mind, everybody else, hold that in your mind. Working with Flatiron, White Hat plans to send the first group of apprentices on an 18-month software engineering program in October.

No, WeWork is now basically folding, I doubt they will be doing this. Here's a quote. If done right, apprenticeships can outflank the best universities, explains CEO Ewan Blair. What? Really, this is a delicious amuse-bouche you have brought for us. My dad helped create the world's biggest apprenticeship scheme of all time, taking kids out of school and straight into work.

It's called ISIS. I was going to talk about his father later. Amazing. Yeah, Ewan Blair, who sidestepped a potential career in politics. You don't say. I wonder if there were any reasons why that might have been the case. So yeah, that's White Hat. Why is it called White Hat?

Thank you. I don't know. It's a good color for a hat. Maybe because the apprentices wear plucky white hats, you know, just to let you know where they are. They have to wear chef's hats no matter what they're doing. They have to wear chef's hats no matter what they're doing. Just send a bunch of fucking douchebag apprentices to kill Texas Red.

When I was a little kid in Germany in first grade for the first semester, we had to wear bright orange hats when we walked to school. So everyone knew if there was a lost first grader, they were like, oh, he's wearing the first grader hat. Oh, bully these children's sign. Well, it was more for like, because we didn't have buses in the town I lived in, but I'm thinking of that. It's basically the hat you wear when you're free labor for tech companies, and they're

absolutely not going to give you a job, so they can say they did. It's just a dunce cap. Exactly. They've invented the dunce cap yet again. The dunce cap was part of the like Catholic penitent penitent uniform that make you wear during an auto-defei. Really? I didn't know that.

It was an auto-defei. Apart from someone you went to school with. It's what you want to do, but you do anyway. Yeah. Yes. Alice and I at least have watched Mel Brooks's history of the world part one. An auto-defei was the sort of carnival of purification that would happen after the inquisition came to your town.

Some people would just be scourged, others would be warned, and others would be burned. Sounds like a junior Difford minister. Also, the dunce cap, this seems like a folk etymology, but actually was designed to make fun of the scholastic philosopher Dunns Scotus. Wow. What? Jeremy Dunns Scotus? What?

I'm so lost right now. Yeah, look. Maybe they have a point. Maybe we should outflank universities, because all they do is give you this useless knowledge that you used to make a podcast with your friends. Oh, so speaking of schools and universities, I'd like to steer us away from Ewan Blair's like incredible height, incredible like what seems like a scam, but is a clearly legal company to like funnel money from payroll taxes back into.

In this episode, the role of Ewan Blair is being played by Ray Winston. I've saw the pressure screams to North Haverbrook and Ogdenville, and by God, I put them on the map. So, we're going to talk a little bit about fundamental British values, these things that bring us all together. I love those. Perfect. So, David.

The racism thing. David, you're, well, we're going to get to that. You're a teacher. Tell me, how do you communicate British values to your students in the form of a tech talk? It's going to be somewhat difficult to do a tech talk. We haven't gone one of those yet. We have a bunch of posters about the place that are particularly good. Yes.

And I have painstakingly written down everything that appears on this poster, and I would like to ask the audience to attempt to guess what appears. Imagine Britishness. We have a teacher on once and we have to do group work. Damn. Can I be on Alice's group? No. You're just talking the whole time.

Is it just the very British problems Twitter account, like just like, oh, when there's too much milk in the tea. It's okay. It's either Winston Churchill or some bullshit about like having a cup of tea in a burning down house and being like, oh, this just won't do. No, there is definitely Winston Churchill. He's juxtaposed next to a sentence, believe in yourself. I did the Bengali famine.

Believe in yourself. One thing that Winston Churchill did say that he said, just have fun with it and believe in yourself. Bringing Britain back to the gold standard, just setting off an economic crisis. Definitely believe in yourself. Winston Churchill, like eight bottles of wine in just grumbling to some woman that she's hideous. But actually it's like a lamppost and falling asleep and it's like, ah, British value.

It's resting the nation. British values are doing a bloodbath invasion of your enemies like southern front and over some incredibly mountainous terrain. During during Dunkirk, just Winston Churchill going on TV and talking about how he's getting up at 4am every day and meditating to defeat the loved one. Winston Lofill. I can't do any better than that. So we do have Winston Churchill.

We also have the Queen, which is juxtaposed next to a sentence, respect those that keep us safe. Like the Queen, for example. I'm not fully sure how she does so. There's no burglars exist in Britain. Laser eyes. Basically, no one has to worry about their home being burgled because every burglar in Britain just wants the gold piano.

And so the Queen is keeping us safe in that regard. You know what I think it is? She's hoarding all the old stuff. It's a study in Emerald, right? The Queen is clearly some kind of Cthulhu-like being who like anchors us against cosmic horror, but also is driving the entire country slowly insane.