http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30559219

I think there's a lot of implication going on there. Are there actually many over 50s who haven't used a computer at this point? That seems to be the thrust of that, especially with the stuff about social media (as if the average small business is giving that much thought). And if I was an unscrupulous employer I think I'd hire the older person who was less likely to leave over the younger one.

they need to support the over 50's by all means possible as we have the voting power and are willing to go out and vote
lowering the voting age will not make much of a difference as the younger generation cant be bothered ...

There are lots of such people who have never used a computer for work; that have spent the last 30 years doing something involving a lot of standing up or driving, and now want a job with more sitting down or less lifting or something.

Their previous computing experience often extends as far as webmail, ravelry (a knitting website) and 888 poker. A little help with how to set appointments in Outlook, and the basics of Excel might be quite useful for them.

how demeaning of the aged population ...

On the other hand, as somebody who has worked in IT since 1982, I am shocked by how little the youth of today know about computing.

Very few of them could set up a Word template, they don't understand numbering of sections and paragraphs, they don't even know how to open a template, other than normal.dot! The same with other standard office productivity software, and don't even get me started on things like SAP, Dynamics and other real business software. They might be able to navigate Facebook and Twitter and spend their day laughing over WhatsApp posts, but actually using a computer effectively? And I'm talking about administration and secretarial staff, whose job it is to use such software day-in and day-out.

Even the programmers that are coming through today have little or know knowledge of the computers they are programming. When I learnt programming, we had to learn machine code and execution priorities and execution cycles. We knew how to optimise code, so that it was efficient. None of that seems important any more. They are taught to write pretty code, but they aren't taught how to optimise it.

I worked for an advertising agency that made the web presence for several retail shops, including their eShops. Most of the programmers were under 25 and most of the managers were under 40. During my trial period they had a problem that when the PayPal newsletter went out, the eShop of one customer would collapse under the load - it would take over a minute to load the menu structure, for example and the DB admin would have to restart MySQL every couple of minutes.

After a couple of hours looking at the code and checking the technical documentation for MySQL, I re-ordered some of the links between the tables. The code wasn't as pretty, but the load times for the menu structure plummeted from nearly a minute to under 5 hundredths of a second. Similar changes throughout the code and a couple of minor changes to the indexing and the system could support 250 users per load balanced server, as opposed to 100 users over all servers! That got me a full time gig on an open contract - I was the first employee to be offered a contract of more than 12 months.