Best Of

Get rid, he's useless.

General Election now, and here's the winner. He has some super new plans for the NHS that I think all his voters are going to love.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO9Sd1MDR1H/?igsh=azFwZWdhcHp1Z2xz

Unfortunately I think UK insurance companies have more in common with those in the USA than with those in Europe. An insurance-based system does seem to work in Europe and my perception is that it's because the companies aren't out to screw the customer for every last penny.

I was being mischievous. I very much doubt the average Reform voters has any clue that their healthcare could cost them £420 a month.

This guy is getting away with blue murder and very few are calling him out. I am particularly disappointed with the Conservatives, they seem to look upon this outrageous clown as a friend and ally on the basis of my enemy's enemy is my friend.

How much do you think the NHS costs the average Reform voter at the moment? And is that good value for money?

We spend a very similar percentage of GDP as European peers such as Germany and France.

But the median age in those countries is higher than the UK. And health outcomes can be debated, but we're certainly not an obvious leader of the pack.

I think both sides could do with accepting that the NHS isn't as amazing or awful as some imagine.

The US system, by contrast, is objectively awful. Extremely high cost and worse outcomes at an aggregate level.

I imagine there's lots we could learn from where some European nations deliver better value for money than us.

Get rid, he's useless.

General Election now, and here's the winner. He has some super new plans for the NHS that I think all his voters are going to love.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO9Sd1MDR1H/?igsh=azFwZWdhcHp1Z2xz

Unfortunately I think UK insurance companies have more in common with those in the USA than with those in Europe. An insurance-based system does seem to work in Europe and my perception is that it's because the companies aren't out to screw the customer for every last penny.

I was being mischievous. I very much doubt the average Reform voters has any clue that their healthcare could cost them £420 a month.

This guy is getting away with blue murder and very few are calling him out. I am particularly disappointed with the Conservatives, they seem to look upon this outrageous clown as a friend and ally on the basis of my enemy's enemy is my friend.

How much do you think the NHS costs the average Reform voter at the moment? And is that good value for money?

We spend a very similar percentage of GDP as European peers such as Germany and France.

But the median age in those countries is higher than the UK. And health outcomes can be debated, but we're certainly not an obvious leader of the pack.

I think both sides could do with accepting that the NHS isn't as amazing or awful as some imagine.

The US system, by contrast, is objectively awful. Extremely high cost and worse outcomes at an aggregate level.

I imagine there's lots we could learn from where some European nations deliver better value for money than us.

A friend is something of a polyglot. She gets annoyed with people online who are always looking for One Simple Trick to learn a language quickly. There's no such thing, she says. You just have to put the work in.

I feel the same about healthcare policy. People want One Simple Trick to deliver better healthcare at less cost. It doesn't exist. Yes, there are plenty of small things you can do. The healthcare policy research literature is full of international comparisons and proposals, and the NHS is constantly looking at these, piloting schemes and making changes. But switching to, say, the German healthcare system isn't going to spectacularly change the underlying challenges: healthcare costs money and the population is ageing. The research suggests that, more or less, the different delivery systems across Europe don't make that much difference, but the amount you spend does.

Now that Xitter is revealing the locations of various accounts, a swathe of cultural rightish accounts have been revealed to be be (in come cases quite sophisticated) Russian disinfo mills.

Has anyone spotted equivalent leftish accounts who also turn out to be located in Eastern Europe / the Russian Federation? Russia is notorious for playing both sides of cultural conflicts in the countries they target.

This is where we need Leon's TwiX expertise.

The Soviets were very fond of using “active measures” during the Cold War to destabilise their enemies. The Soviets often took an agnostic, opportunistic approach to internal politics in target countries. Their goal was not to promote a coherent ideology everywhere, but to amplify whatever tensions already existed, regardless of political alignment, as long as it undermined their adversaries.

The “active measures” they employed were dialectical. Ideologically agnostic. They wanted to exploit existing fractures. Not create new ones.

There’s no reason to believe this strategy is any different now.

The context is redundant as the bar chart is accurately drawn. The zig zag shown shows there is a gap between 0 and first y-axis term of 200,000.

Dodgy bar charts omit that zig zag normally. There's nothing dodgy here.

The bigger issue is the more fundamental one that the data is accurate and that the Government has done nothing to improve the situation in future years either.

I disagree. The “zig zag” is a sale, or axis, break, which is very common in specialised contexts. But data visualisation needs to serve fundamentally different audiences with different needs, knowledge bases, and attention spans in public vs specialist contexts. Specialist audiences share disciplinary knowledge of standard visual conventions in their field. They can interpret complex encodings like log scales, or axis breaks, without explanation. Public audiences lack this shared foundation, so visualisation should use intuitive visual metaphors and limit jargon. This one utilises such visual jargon, making it as bad as a Lib Dem bar chart.