One of Starmer or Johnson doesn’t understand the care proposals.
It has been the case that the home is only sold on death to pay care costs
Actually, I think under present system that is up to the local council in question. They have to agree to defer until death.
I do not know of anyone having to sell their home while they are alive
Of course it may be the home is sold as they do not live in it, but I would ask if anybody has any experience of a home owner having to sell to pay their care costs while they are alive
The PM didn’t say anything about qualifying his statement because the house isn’t sold to pay for care until after death.
Nor did the Tory manifesto qualify its promise in that way.
Indeed, didn’t the whole issue arise because Mrs May proposed to use the proceeds of people’s homes, sold after death? Hence the ‘death tax’?
People in that position are more worried about their inheritance than having somewhere to live - their being in care generally being a one way street.
The literal wording from the manifesto is "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " If that isn't about the inheritance left to pass on to their kids then what is it?
The whole reason for the reform is to stop someone's entire assets being swallowed up by care costs so that there is nothing left to inherit. And the PM stood up and repeatedly said that nobody would have to sell their home because the home is not counted as an asset. This is simply wrong. He either doesn't know his own policy or he is lying about it.
Question - how many of the red wallers are going to accept your attempts at sophistry and go "fair enough, I'm being taxed heavily so that I don't lose my home, but I'm going to lose it anyway whilst the well off dont. yes of course the Tories still have my vote".
Northerners are not stupid.
The PM said "nobody would have to sell their home" which is true. They have the option of selling it or not selling it with payments due being paid after death.
In addition there are situations where the main home is exempt anyway: at home care, spouse still living in the house, other relative over 60 living in house, any relative of any age still living in the house etc etc.
If you need to pay £86k and of your £100k assets almost all of it is your home, where exactly are you to get the money other than from the sale of the home?
Yes we know its payable after death - its the dementia death tax which removes inheritance. So why did he said "you don't need to sell your home" when you do? And if you definitely don't need to, why didn't the Solicitor General firmly put Jo Coburn back in her box on the telly just now?
When you go into a care home you do not need to sell your home. Obviously there is accountability after death but what do you expect? That taxpayers cover everything when wealth in property can be used to cover some of the cost? You are misrepresenting things for party political reasons. As Starmer did earlier. And as the media did re: May's plans.
Social Care is important. We must stick to the facts. Below is a worked example from the published proposals which is not too dissimilar from yours.
"Yusuf is in his late 70s. He has lived on his own since his wife died from cancer ten years ago. When she died, he downsized from their family home in Hastings to a smaller property worth £180,000. As a result, he has £70,000 in savings.
Yusuf develops dementia, can no longer cope at home and needs to move into residential care. His underlying health is good and he ultimately spends eight years living at the residential home. Yusuf's care home costs £700 per week. Under the current system, Yusuf would spend about £293,000 on his care from his assets and his income, and as a result only have £72,000 left in assets.
Under the new system, Yusuf hits the £86,000 cap after three years and four months. He no longer needs to contribute for his personal care from either his assets or his income. Beyond this, he will only have to contribute towards daily living costs. He is now left with £173,000, almost 70 per cent of his original assets.
Over his whole care journey, Yusuf spends £123,000 less than under the current system."
Its very very simple. EVen for PB Peppa parrots.
The issue is inheritance. If you have to sell your home to pay for care - whether before or after your death - it does not pass to your children. Fear of this death tax has driven all kinds of policies and pledges. Including in this case the "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " pledge repeated by Peppa today.
This simply is not true with the new bill. And you've given the exact example that northern red wall Tories will be wapped round the head with. Reduce Yusuf's assets to £120k of which almost all is the house, and there will be no other way to pay the £86k retrospectively other than sell the house to pay for care.
Yusef in Hasting's estate is £173k. Yusuf in Hartlepool's estate is £34k. It slams working class northerners in a way that it doesn't southerners.
You mentioned the facts. Why doesn't the PM know them?
The system is the same whether you live in Hastings or Hartlepool.
Some people have more valuable houses/estates than others. This is the case now and has nothing to do with it.
You seem to be arguing that the system should be different in Hastings and Hartlepool.
It is fair to point out that this is a transfer of wealth from Hartlepool to Hastings (or more so Brighton/Guildford/London etc) as the money raised via NI will be much closer between the two, than the money saved by those needing care. It is the opposite of levelling up.
The average Tory voter could not care less about levelling up if they have to pay for it and it means more of their assets going to the tax man.
Levelling up via better infrastructure for the North is fine, levelling up at the expense of the Tory shires is not
I thought the transport infrastructure for the North, or at least North East, was cancelled last week?
You can improve transport infrastucture in the North without destroying homes in rural shires and massive noise pollution via HS2
I hate to break it to you: but noise from high-speed railways is much less than from motorways. In fact, they can be quieter than conventional railway lines, even at higher speeds.
Is that also true of electric cars ?
That's a really interesting question, and I don't know.
My *guess* would be that, for motorways, tyre noise is far greater than the contributions from engine or aero effects. But that's just a WAG.
I don't know either, but every road planning decision should now have electric as a default rather than ICE as that is the direction we are inexorably trending toward (No point putting fuel duty up or down particularly in the long run now)
I just found this:
"Noise of rolling tires driving on pavement is found to be the biggest contributor of highway noise and increases with higher vehicle speeds."
and
"Traffic operations noise is affected significantly by vehicle speeds, since sound energy roughly doubles for each increment of ten miles an hour in vehicle velocity; an exception to this rule occurs at very low speeds where braking and acceleration noise dominate over aerodynamic noise."
Yes - this is why there are 50 and 60 limits on some urban motorway sections (for noise mitigation).
There's a large area of open space here in the Flatlands a long way from anywhere but even in the middle of it the distant road noise from the M18 is very audible.
They use sound baffles on a lot of highways in the Netherlands. Not sure why we don't do so here.
Road surface matters as well: there is a stretch of the A50 to the west of Uttoxeter that has/used to have a concrete surface: the noise is much louder from inside the car and outside than the neighbouring tarmac sections.
(Nerd factoid alert: when it was built in the 1990s, it was supposed to be the first composite stretch of main road in the UK: a concrete subbase with tarmac wearing surface. For some reason they abandoned the idea and made it concrete.)
One of Starmer or Johnson doesn’t understand the care proposals.
It has been the case that the home is only sold on death to pay care costs
Actually, I think under present system that is up to the local council in question. They have to agree to defer until death.
I do not know of anyone having to sell their home while they are alive
Of course it may be the home is sold as they do not live in it, but I would ask if anybody has any experience of a home owner having to sell to pay their care costs while they are alive
The PM didn’t say anything about qualifying his statement because the house isn’t sold to pay for care until after death.
Nor did the Tory manifesto qualify its promise in that way.
Indeed, didn’t the whole issue arise because Mrs May proposed to use the proceeds of people’s homes, sold after death? Hence the ‘death tax’?
People in that position are more worried about their inheritance than having somewhere to live - their being in care generally being a one way street.
The literal wording from the manifesto is "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " If that isn't about the inheritance left to pass on to their kids then what is it?
The whole reason for the reform is to stop someone's entire assets being swallowed up by care costs so that there is nothing left to inherit. And the PM stood up and repeatedly said that nobody would have to sell their home because the home is not counted as an asset. This is simply wrong. He either doesn't know his own policy or he is lying about it.
Question - how many of the red wallers are going to accept your attempts at sophistry and go "fair enough, I'm being taxed heavily so that I don't lose my home, but I'm going to lose it anyway whilst the well off dont. yes of course the Tories still have my vote".
Northerners are not stupid.
The PM said "nobody would have to sell their home" which is true. They have the option of selling it or not selling it with payments due being paid after death.
In addition there are situations where the main home is exempt anyway: at home care, spouse still living in the house, other relative over 60 living in house, any relative of any age still living in the house etc etc.
If you need to pay £86k and of your £100k assets almost all of it is your home, where exactly are you to get the money other than from the sale of the home?
Yes we know its payable after death - its the dementia death tax which removes inheritance. So why did he said "you don't need to sell your home" when you do? And if you definitely don't need to, why didn't the Solicitor General firmly put Jo Coburn back in her box on the telly just now?
When you go into a care home you do not need to sell your home. Obviously there is accountability after death but what do you expect? That taxpayers cover everything when wealth in property can be used to cover some of the cost? You are misrepresenting things for party political reasons. As Starmer did earlier. And as the media did re: May's plans.
Social Care is important. We must stick to the facts. Below is a worked example from the published proposals which is not too dissimilar from yours.
"Yusuf is in his late 70s. He has lived on his own since his wife died from cancer ten years ago. When she died, he downsized from their family home in Hastings to a smaller property worth £180,000. As a result, he has £70,000 in savings.
Yusuf develops dementia, can no longer cope at home and needs to move into residential care. His underlying health is good and he ultimately spends eight years living at the residential home. Yusuf's care home costs £700 per week. Under the current system, Yusuf would spend about £293,000 on his care from his assets and his income, and as a result only have £72,000 left in assets.
Under the new system, Yusuf hits the £86,000 cap after three years and four months. He no longer needs to contribute for his personal care from either his assets or his income. Beyond this, he will only have to contribute towards daily living costs. He is now left with £173,000, almost 70 per cent of his original assets.
Over his whole care journey, Yusuf spends £123,000 less than under the current system."
Its very very simple. EVen for PB Peppa parrots.
The issue is inheritance. If you have to sell your home to pay for care - whether before or after your death - it does not pass to your children. Fear of this death tax has driven all kinds of policies and pledges. Including in this case the "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " pledge repeated by Peppa today.
This simply is not true with the new bill. And you've given the exact example that northern red wall Tories will be wapped round the head with. Reduce Yusuf's assets to £120k of which almost all is the house, and there will be no other way to pay the £86k retrospectively other than sell the house to pay for care.
Yusef in Hasting's estate is £173k. Yusuf in Hartlepool's estate is £34k. It slams working class northerners in a way that it doesn't southerners.
You mentioned the facts. Why doesn't the PM know them?
The system is the same whether you live in Hastings or Hartlepool.
Some people have more valuable houses/estates than others. This is the case now and has nothing to do with it.
You seem to be arguing that the system should be different in Hastings and Hartlepool.
It is fair to point out that this is a transfer of wealth from Hartlepool to Hastings (or more so Brighton/Guildford/London etc) as the money raised via NI will be much closer between the two, than the money saved by those needing care. It is the opposite of levelling up.
The average Tory voter could not care less about levelling up if they have to pay for it and it means more of their assets going to the tax man.
Levelling up via better infrastructure for the North is fine, levelling up at the expense of the Tory shires is not
You mean the average Epping Tory. The Tory voter in Hartlepool will beg to differ.
The average Tory voter is a home owner in the South
A lot of home-owners in the South are absolutely flabbergasted by the antics and the incompetence and corruption of this so-called Conservative government. This is not how Conservatives used to be.
I think you need to do some catching up, young HY.
One of Starmer or Johnson doesn’t understand the care proposals.
It has been the case that the home is only sold on death to pay care costs
Actually, I think under present system that is up to the local council in question. They have to agree to defer until death.
I do not know of anyone having to sell their home while they are alive
Of course it may be the home is sold as they do not live in it, but I would ask if anybody has any experience of a home owner having to sell to pay their care costs while they are alive
The PM didn’t say anything about qualifying his statement because the house isn’t sold to pay for care until after death.
Nor did the Tory manifesto qualify its promise in that way.
Indeed, didn’t the whole issue arise because Mrs May proposed to use the proceeds of people’s homes, sold after death? Hence the ‘death tax’?
People in that position are more worried about their inheritance than having somewhere to live - their being in care generally being a one way street.
The literal wording from the manifesto is "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " If that isn't about the inheritance left to pass on to their kids then what is it?
The whole reason for the reform is to stop someone's entire assets being swallowed up by care costs so that there is nothing left to inherit. And the PM stood up and repeatedly said that nobody would have to sell their home because the home is not counted as an asset. This is simply wrong. He either doesn't know his own policy or he is lying about it.
Question - how many of the red wallers are going to accept your attempts at sophistry and go "fair enough, I'm being taxed heavily so that I don't lose my home, but I'm going to lose it anyway whilst the well off dont. yes of course the Tories still have my vote".
Northerners are not stupid.
The PM said "nobody would have to sell their home" which is true. They have the option of selling it or not selling it with payments due being paid after death.
In addition there are situations where the main home is exempt anyway: at home care, spouse still living in the house, other relative over 60 living in house, any relative of any age still living in the house etc etc.
If you need to pay £86k and of your £100k assets almost all of it is your home, where exactly are you to get the money other than from the sale of the home?
Yes we know its payable after death - its the dementia death tax which removes inheritance. So why did he said "you don't need to sell your home" when you do? And if you definitely don't need to, why didn't the Solicitor General firmly put Jo Coburn back in her box on the telly just now?
It won't play well in a country obsessed with property wealth and inheritance but legally and logically selling a home after you have died is not selling your home. Once you are dead, it temporarily belongs to your estate then the beneficiaries.
Or doesn't because it will have been sold to pay for your residential care home care...
Then the house is not your home - the care home is.
It's, really dickishly, strictly true.
Like the " "new" "hospitals" ".
If you have been consigned to a care home, I fail to see the need to keep a house.
One of Starmer or Johnson doesn’t understand the care proposals.
It has been the case that the home is only sold on death to pay care costs
Actually, I think under present system that is up to the local council in question. They have to agree to defer until death.
I do not know of anyone having to sell their home while they are alive
Of course it may be the home is sold as they do not live in it, but I would ask if anybody has any experience of a home owner having to sell to pay their care costs while they are alive
The PM didn’t say anything about qualifying his statement because the house isn’t sold to pay for care until after death.
Nor did the Tory manifesto qualify its promise in that way.
Indeed, didn’t the whole issue arise because Mrs May proposed to use the proceeds of people’s homes, sold after death? Hence the ‘death tax’?
People in that position are more worried about their inheritance than having somewhere to live - their being in care generally being a one way street.
The literal wording from the manifesto is "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " If that isn't about the inheritance left to pass on to their kids then what is it?
The whole reason for the reform is to stop someone's entire assets being swallowed up by care costs so that there is nothing left to inherit. And the PM stood up and repeatedly said that nobody would have to sell their home because the home is not counted as an asset. This is simply wrong. He either doesn't know his own policy or he is lying about it.
Question - how many of the red wallers are going to accept your attempts at sophistry and go "fair enough, I'm being taxed heavily so that I don't lose my home, but I'm going to lose it anyway whilst the well off dont. yes of course the Tories still have my vote".
Northerners are not stupid.
The PM said "nobody would have to sell their home" which is true. They have the option of selling it or not selling it with payments due being paid after death.
In addition there are situations where the main home is exempt anyway: at home care, spouse still living in the house, other relative over 60 living in house, any relative of any age still living in the house etc etc.
If you need to pay £86k and of your £100k assets almost all of it is your home, where exactly are you to get the money other than from the sale of the home?
Yes we know its payable after death - its the dementia death tax which removes inheritance. So why did he said "you don't need to sell your home" when you do? And if you definitely don't need to, why didn't the Solicitor General firmly put Jo Coburn back in her box on the telly just now?
When you go into a care home you do not need to sell your home. Obviously there is accountability after death but what do you expect? That taxpayers cover everything when wealth in property can be used to cover some of the cost? You are misrepresenting things for party political reasons. As Starmer did earlier. And as the media did re: May's plans.
Social Care is important. We must stick to the facts. Below is a worked example from the published proposals which is not too dissimilar from yours.
"Yusuf is in his late 70s. He has lived on his own since his wife died from cancer ten years ago. When she died, he downsized from their family home in Hastings to a smaller property worth £180,000. As a result, he has £70,000 in savings.
Yusuf develops dementia, can no longer cope at home and needs to move into residential care. His underlying health is good and he ultimately spends eight years living at the residential home. Yusuf's care home costs £700 per week. Under the current system, Yusuf would spend about £293,000 on his care from his assets and his income, and as a result only have £72,000 left in assets.
Under the new system, Yusuf hits the £86,000 cap after three years and four months. He no longer needs to contribute for his personal care from either his assets or his income. Beyond this, he will only have to contribute towards daily living costs. He is now left with £173,000, almost 70 per cent of his original assets.
Over his whole care journey, Yusuf spends £123,000 less than under the current system."
Its very very simple. EVen for PB Peppa parrots.
The issue is inheritance. If you have to sell your home to pay for care - whether before or after your death - it does not pass to your children. Fear of this death tax has driven all kinds of policies and pledges. Including in this case the "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " pledge repeated by Peppa today.
This simply is not true with the new bill. And you've given the exact example that northern red wall Tories will be wapped round the head with. Reduce Yusuf's assets to £120k of which almost all is the house, and there will be no other way to pay the £86k retrospectively other than sell the house to pay for care.
Yusef in Hasting's estate is £173k. Yusuf in Hartlepool's estate is £34k. It slams working class northerners in a way that it doesn't southerners.
You mentioned the facts. Why doesn't the PM know them?
The system is the same whether you live in Hastings or Hartlepool.
Some people have more valuable houses/estates than others. This is the case now and has nothing to do with it.
You seem to be arguing that the system should be different in Hastings and Hartlepool.
It is fair to point out that this is a transfer of wealth from Hartlepool to Hastings (or more so Brighton/Guildford/London etc) as the money raised via NI will be much closer between the two, than the money saved by those needing care. It is the opposite of levelling up.
The average Tory voter could not care less about levelling up if they have to pay for it and it means more of their assets going to the tax man.
Levelling up via better infrastructure for the North is fine, levelling up at the expense of the Tory shires is not
I thought the transport infrastructure for the North, or at least North East, was cancelled last week?
You can improve transport infrastucture in the North without destroying homes in rural shires and massive noise pollution via HS2
I hate to break it to you: but noise from high-speed railways is much less than from motorways. In fact, they can be quieter than conventional railway lines, even at higher speeds.
Is that also true of electric cars ?
That's a really interesting question, and I don't know.
My *guess* would be that, for motorways, tyre noise is far greater than the contributions from engine or aero effects. But that's just a WAG.
I don't know either, but every road planning decision should now have electric as a default rather than ICE as that is the direction we are inexorably trending toward (No point putting fuel duty up or down particularly in the long run now)
I just found this:
"Noise of rolling tires driving on pavement is found to be the biggest contributor of highway noise and increases with higher vehicle speeds."
and
"Traffic operations noise is affected significantly by vehicle speeds, since sound energy roughly doubles for each increment of ten miles an hour in vehicle velocity; an exception to this rule occurs at very low speeds where braking and acceleration noise dominate over aerodynamic noise."
Yes - this is why there are 50 and 60 limits on some urban motorway sections (for noise mitigation).
There's a large area of open space here in the Flatlands a long way from anywhere but even in the middle of it the distant road noise from the M18 is very audible.
They use sound baffles on a lot of highways in the Netherlands. Not sure why we don't do so here.
Road surface matters as well: there is a stretch of the A50 to the west of Uttoxeter that has/used to have a concrete surface: the noise is much louder from inside the car and outside than the neighbouring tarmac sections.
(Nerd factoid alert: when it was built in the 1990s, it was supposed to be the first composite stretch of main road in the UK: a concrete subbase with tarmac wearing surface. For some reason they abandoned the idea and made it concrete.)
The A1(M) is 1 mile away from here as the crow flies. At night, with a window open you can hear it alongside the town clock (again a mile or so away).
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
What?
European countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary - and several others - are way ahead of us in deaths per million
You're right, I misread the chart. We are still well above average for Western Europe, however. But that will change.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Do you have an edge, or was it mainly luck/variance?
That is the crucial question to ask yourself. Many (most?) punters mistake the two after a big win or heavy loss. Be honest with yourself about whether or not you have an edge.
I don’t play poker so can’t advise further.
Against all my instincts, I started playing slots a few weeks ago and lost a fair chunk of change. I’m really pissed off with myself because I know slots don’t have an edge. Grr. Stupid me. Even if I had won, it would still have been stupid to play.
It is close to impossible to have an edge in your first online poker tournament, but if you can win that, then you have a reasonable chance of being able to develop an edge if you put the hours in to both playing and learning.
How much advantage does software give you for online play?
I have not been active for a few years but even back then I'd say 95%+ of players earning $10hr+ were using software. Care is needed as to what software you do use, as each site has their own specific rules about what is allowed.
Ah, so its a lot like online gaming. But maybe worse as it wont be possible to stop external software. Plus £s are on the line so the incentives much higher than say counter strike?.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
That would be fraud. Normally when multi billion pound companies conduct systematic fraud it is for something a bit more than nudging up the action.
Yes, hard to imagine they would really do that. It just happened SO much I got suspicious.
Most likely an illusion because everyone pays more attention to a big pot all in which is far more likely when multiple premium hands are out there, than all the scrappy hands won without a showdown at all.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Do you have an edge, or was it mainly luck/variance?
That is the crucial question to ask yourself. Many (most?) punters mistake the two after a big win or heavy loss. Be honest with yourself about whether or not you have an edge.
I don’t play poker so can’t advise further.
Against all my instincts, I started playing slots a few weeks ago and lost a fair chunk of change. I’m really pissed off with myself because I know slots don’t have an edge. Grr. Stupid me. Even if I had won, it would still have been stupid to play.
It is close to impossible to have an edge in your first online poker tournament, but if you can win that, then you have a reasonable chance of being able to develop an edge if you put the hours in to both playing and learning.
How much advantage does software give you for online play?
I have not been active for a few years but even back then I'd say 95%+ of players earning $10hr+ were using software. Care is needed as to what software you do use, as each site has their own specific rules about what is allowed.
Ah, so its a lot like online gaming. But maybe worse as it wont be possible to stop external software. Plus £s are on the line so the incentives much higher than say counter strike?.
Pokerstars were very good at stopping external software but it was an arms race between cheaters and their integrity department with both being on top at times and both losing at times.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Cool turquoise gloves
An everyday scene of a family out for a stroll in the land of Freedom.
The one on the right has tripwire connected to the bulge of semtex in his trousers? No one is getting close enough to cut off his Johnson
One of Starmer or Johnson doesn’t understand the care proposals.
It has been the case that the home is only sold on death to pay care costs
Actually, I think under present system that is up to the local council in question. They have to agree to defer until death.
I do not know of anyone having to sell their home while they are alive
Of course it may be the home is sold as they do not live in it, but I would ask if anybody has any experience of a home owner having to sell to pay their care costs while they are alive
The PM didn’t say anything about qualifying his statement because the house isn’t sold to pay for care until after death.
Nor did the Tory manifesto qualify its promise in that way.
Indeed, didn’t the whole issue arise because Mrs May proposed to use the proceeds of people’s homes, sold after death? Hence the ‘death tax’?
People in that position are more worried about their inheritance than having somewhere to live - their being in care generally being a one way street.
The literal wording from the manifesto is "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " If that isn't about the inheritance left to pass on to their kids then what is it?
The whole reason for the reform is to stop someone's entire assets being swallowed up by care costs so that there is nothing left to inherit. And the PM stood up and repeatedly said that nobody would have to sell their home because the home is not counted as an asset. This is simply wrong. He either doesn't know his own policy or he is lying about it.
Question - how many of the red wallers are going to accept your attempts at sophistry and go "fair enough, I'm being taxed heavily so that I don't lose my home, but I'm going to lose it anyway whilst the well off dont. yes of course the Tories still have my vote".
Northerners are not stupid.
The PM said "nobody would have to sell their home" which is true. They have the option of selling it or not selling it with payments due being paid after death.
In addition there are situations where the main home is exempt anyway: at home care, spouse still living in the house, other relative over 60 living in house, any relative of any age still living in the house etc etc.
If you need to pay £86k and of your £100k assets almost all of it is your home, where exactly are you to get the money other than from the sale of the home?
Yes we know its payable after death - its the dementia death tax which removes inheritance. So why did he said "you don't need to sell your home" when you do? And if you definitely don't need to, why didn't the Solicitor General firmly put Jo Coburn back in her box on the telly just now?
When you go into a care home you do not need to sell your home. Obviously there is accountability after death but what do you expect? That taxpayers cover everything when wealth in property can be used to cover some of the cost? You are misrepresenting things for party political reasons. As Starmer did earlier. And as the media did re: May's plans.
Social Care is important. We must stick to the facts. Below is a worked example from the published proposals which is not too dissimilar from yours.
"Yusuf is in his late 70s. He has lived on his own since his wife died from cancer ten years ago. When she died, he downsized from their family home in Hastings to a smaller property worth £180,000. As a result, he has £70,000 in savings.
Yusuf develops dementia, can no longer cope at home and needs to move into residential care. His underlying health is good and he ultimately spends eight years living at the residential home. Yusuf's care home costs £700 per week. Under the current system, Yusuf would spend about £293,000 on his care from his assets and his income, and as a result only have £72,000 left in assets.
Under the new system, Yusuf hits the £86,000 cap after three years and four months. He no longer needs to contribute for his personal care from either his assets or his income. Beyond this, he will only have to contribute towards daily living costs. He is now left with £173,000, almost 70 per cent of his original assets.
Over his whole care journey, Yusuf spends £123,000 less than under the current system."
Its very very simple. EVen for PB Peppa parrots.
The issue is inheritance. If you have to sell your home to pay for care - whether before or after your death - it does not pass to your children. Fear of this death tax has driven all kinds of policies and pledges. Including in this case the "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " pledge repeated by Peppa today.
This simply is not true with the new bill. And you've given the exact example that northern red wall Tories will be wapped round the head with. Reduce Yusuf's assets to £120k of which almost all is the house, and there will be no other way to pay the £86k retrospectively other than sell the house to pay for care.
Yusef in Hasting's estate is £173k. Yusuf in Hartlepool's estate is £34k. It slams working class northerners in a way that it doesn't southerners.
You mentioned the facts. Why doesn't the PM know them?
The system is the same whether you live in Hastings or Hartlepool.
Some people have more valuable houses/estates than others. This is the case now and has nothing to do with it.
You seem to be arguing that the system should be different in Hastings and Hartlepool.
It is fair to point out that this is a transfer of wealth from Hartlepool to Hastings (or more so Brighton/Guildford/London etc) as the money raised via NI will be much closer between the two, than the money saved by those needing care. It is the opposite of levelling up.
The average Tory voter could not care less about levelling up if they have to pay for it and it means more of their assets going to the tax man.
Levelling up via better infrastructure for the North is fine, levelling up at the expense of the Tory shires is not
You mean the average Epping Tory. The Tory voter in Hartlepool will beg to differ.
The average Tory voter is a home owner in the South
A lot of home-owners in the South are absolutely flabbergasted by the antics and the incompetence and corruption of this so-called Conservative government. This is not how Conservatives used to be.
I think you need to do some catching up, young HY.
One of Starmer or Johnson doesn’t understand the care proposals.
It has been the case that the home is only sold on death to pay care costs
Actually, I think under present system that is up to the local council in question. They have to agree to defer until death.
I do not know of anyone having to sell their home while they are alive
Of course it may be the home is sold as they do not live in it, but I would ask if anybody has any experience of a home owner having to sell to pay their care costs while they are alive
The PM didn’t say anything about qualifying his statement because the house isn’t sold to pay for care until after death.
Nor did the Tory manifesto qualify its promise in that way.
Indeed, didn’t the whole issue arise because Mrs May proposed to use the proceeds of people’s homes, sold after death? Hence the ‘death tax’?
People in that position are more worried about their inheritance than having somewhere to live - their being in care generally being a one way street.
The literal wording from the manifesto is "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " If that isn't about the inheritance left to pass on to their kids then what is it?
The whole reason for the reform is to stop someone's entire assets being swallowed up by care costs so that there is nothing left to inherit. And the PM stood up and repeatedly said that nobody would have to sell their home because the home is not counted as an asset. This is simply wrong. He either doesn't know his own policy or he is lying about it.
Question - how many of the red wallers are going to accept your attempts at sophistry and go "fair enough, I'm being taxed heavily so that I don't lose my home, but I'm going to lose it anyway whilst the well off dont. yes of course the Tories still have my vote".
Northerners are not stupid.
The PM said "nobody would have to sell their home" which is true. They have the option of selling it or not selling it with payments due being paid after death.
In addition there are situations where the main home is exempt anyway: at home care, spouse still living in the house, other relative over 60 living in house, any relative of any age still living in the house etc etc.
If you need to pay £86k and of your £100k assets almost all of it is your home, where exactly are you to get the money other than from the sale of the home?
Yes we know its payable after death - its the dementia death tax which removes inheritance. So why did he said "you don't need to sell your home" when you do? And if you definitely don't need to, why didn't the Solicitor General firmly put Jo Coburn back in her box on the telly just now?
It won't play well in a country obsessed with property wealth and inheritance but legally and logically selling a home after you have died is not selling your home. Once you are dead, it temporarily belongs to your estate then the beneficiaries.
Or doesn't because it will have been sold to pay for your residential care home care...
Then the house is not your home - the care home is.
It's, really dickishly, strictly true.
Like the " "new" "hospitals" ".
If you have been consigned to a care home, I fail to see the need to keep a house.
One of Starmer or Johnson doesn’t understand the care proposals.
It has been the case that the home is only sold on death to pay care costs
Actually, I think under present system that is up to the local council in question. They have to agree to defer until death.
I do not know of anyone having to sell their home while they are alive
Of course it may be the home is sold as they do not live in it, but I would ask if anybody has any experience of a home owner having to sell to pay their care costs while they are alive
The PM didn’t say anything about qualifying his statement because the house isn’t sold to pay for care until after death.
Nor did the Tory manifesto qualify its promise in that way.
Indeed, didn’t the whole issue arise because Mrs May proposed to use the proceeds of people’s homes, sold after death? Hence the ‘death tax’?
People in that position are more worried about their inheritance than having somewhere to live - their being in care generally being a one way street.
The literal wording from the manifesto is "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " If that isn't about the inheritance left to pass on to their kids then what is it?
The whole reason for the reform is to stop someone's entire assets being swallowed up by care costs so that there is nothing left to inherit. And the PM stood up and repeatedly said that nobody would have to sell their home because the home is not counted as an asset. This is simply wrong. He either doesn't know his own policy or he is lying about it.
Question - how many of the red wallers are going to accept your attempts at sophistry and go "fair enough, I'm being taxed heavily so that I don't lose my home, but I'm going to lose it anyway whilst the well off dont. yes of course the Tories still have my vote".
Northerners are not stupid.
The PM said "nobody would have to sell their home" which is true. They have the option of selling it or not selling it with payments due being paid after death.
In addition there are situations where the main home is exempt anyway: at home care, spouse still living in the house, other relative over 60 living in house, any relative of any age still living in the house etc etc.
If you need to pay £86k and of your £100k assets almost all of it is your home, where exactly are you to get the money other than from the sale of the home?
Yes we know its payable after death - its the dementia death tax which removes inheritance. So why did he said "you don't need to sell your home" when you do? And if you definitely don't need to, why didn't the Solicitor General firmly put Jo Coburn back in her box on the telly just now?
When you go into a care home you do not need to sell your home. Obviously there is accountability after death but what do you expect? That taxpayers cover everything when wealth in property can be used to cover some of the cost? You are misrepresenting things for party political reasons. As Starmer did earlier. And as the media did re: May's plans.
Social Care is important. We must stick to the facts. Below is a worked example from the published proposals which is not too dissimilar from yours.
"Yusuf is in his late 70s. He has lived on his own since his wife died from cancer ten years ago. When she died, he downsized from their family home in Hastings to a smaller property worth £180,000. As a result, he has £70,000 in savings.
Yusuf develops dementia, can no longer cope at home and needs to move into residential care. His underlying health is good and he ultimately spends eight years living at the residential home. Yusuf's care home costs £700 per week. Under the current system, Yusuf would spend about £293,000 on his care from his assets and his income, and as a result only have £72,000 left in assets.
Under the new system, Yusuf hits the £86,000 cap after three years and four months. He no longer needs to contribute for his personal care from either his assets or his income. Beyond this, he will only have to contribute towards daily living costs. He is now left with £173,000, almost 70 per cent of his original assets.
Over his whole care journey, Yusuf spends £123,000 less than under the current system."
Its very very simple. EVen for PB Peppa parrots.
The issue is inheritance. If you have to sell your home to pay for care - whether before or after your death - it does not pass to your children. Fear of this death tax has driven all kinds of policies and pledges. Including in this case the "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " pledge repeated by Peppa today.
This simply is not true with the new bill. And you've given the exact example that northern red wall Tories will be wapped round the head with. Reduce Yusuf's assets to £120k of which almost all is the house, and there will be no other way to pay the £86k retrospectively other than sell the house to pay for care.
Yusef in Hasting's estate is £173k. Yusuf in Hartlepool's estate is £34k. It slams working class northerners in a way that it doesn't southerners.
You mentioned the facts. Why doesn't the PM know them?
The system is the same whether you live in Hastings or Hartlepool.
Some people have more valuable houses/estates than others. This is the case now and has nothing to do with it.
You seem to be arguing that the system should be different in Hastings and Hartlepool.
It is fair to point out that this is a transfer of wealth from Hartlepool to Hastings (or more so Brighton/Guildford/London etc) as the money raised via NI will be much closer between the two, than the money saved by those needing care. It is the opposite of levelling up.
The average Tory voter could not care less about levelling up if they have to pay for it and it means more of their assets going to the tax man.
Levelling up via better infrastructure for the North is fine, levelling up at the expense of the Tory shires is not
You mean the average Epping Tory. The Tory voter in Hartlepool will beg to differ.
The average Tory voter is a home owner in the South
A lot of home-owners in the South are absolutely flabbergasted by the antics and the incompetence and corruption of this so-called Conservative government. This is not how Conservatives used to be.
I think you need to do some catching up, young HY.
One of Starmer or Johnson doesn’t understand the care proposals.
It has been the case that the home is only sold on death to pay care costs
Actually, I think under present system that is up to the local council in question. They have to agree to defer until death.
I do not know of anyone having to sell their home while they are alive
Of course it may be the home is sold as they do not live in it, but I would ask if anybody has any experience of a home owner having to sell to pay their care costs while they are alive
The PM didn’t say anything about qualifying his statement because the house isn’t sold to pay for care until after death.
Nor did the Tory manifesto qualify its promise in that way.
Indeed, didn’t the whole issue arise because Mrs May proposed to use the proceeds of people’s homes, sold after death? Hence the ‘death tax’?
People in that position are more worried about their inheritance than having somewhere to live - their being in care generally being a one way street.
The literal wording from the manifesto is "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " If that isn't about the inheritance left to pass on to their kids then what is it?
The whole reason for the reform is to stop someone's entire assets being swallowed up by care costs so that there is nothing left to inherit. And the PM stood up and repeatedly said that nobody would have to sell their home because the home is not counted as an asset. This is simply wrong. He either doesn't know his own policy or he is lying about it.
Question - how many of the red wallers are going to accept your attempts at sophistry and go "fair enough, I'm being taxed heavily so that I don't lose my home, but I'm going to lose it anyway whilst the well off dont. yes of course the Tories still have my vote".
Northerners are not stupid.
The PM said "nobody would have to sell their home" which is true. They have the option of selling it or not selling it with payments due being paid after death.
In addition there are situations where the main home is exempt anyway: at home care, spouse still living in the house, other relative over 60 living in house, any relative of any age still living in the house etc etc.
If you need to pay £86k and of your £100k assets almost all of it is your home, where exactly are you to get the money other than from the sale of the home?
Yes we know its payable after death - its the dementia death tax which removes inheritance. So why did he said "you don't need to sell your home" when you do? And if you definitely don't need to, why didn't the Solicitor General firmly put Jo Coburn back in her box on the telly just now?
It won't play well in a country obsessed with property wealth and inheritance but legally and logically selling a home after you have died is not selling your home. Once you are dead, it temporarily belongs to your estate then the beneficiaries.
Or doesn't because it will have been sold to pay for your residential care home care...
Then the house is not your home - the care home is.
It's, really dickishly, strictly true.
Like the " "new" "hospitals" ".
If you have been consigned to a care home, I fail to see the need to keep a house.
What is it for?
It would be hugely important to me to feel that my home with my stuff in it still existed and I could in theory return to it, even (or especially) if I was only realistically leaving the care home in a coffin.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Do you have an edge, or was it mainly luck/variance?
That is the crucial question to ask yourself. Many (most?) punters mistake the two after a big win or heavy loss. Be honest with yourself about whether or not you have an edge.
I don’t play poker so can’t advise further.
Against all my instincts, I started playing slots a few weeks ago and lost a fair chunk of change. I’m really pissed off with myself because I know slots don’t have an edge. Grr. Stupid me. Even if I had won, it would still have been stupid to play.
It is close to impossible to have an edge in your first online poker tournament, but if you can win that, then you have a reasonable chance of being able to develop an edge if you put the hours in to both playing and learning.
How much advantage does software give you for online play?
I have not been active for a few years but even back then I'd say 95%+ of players earning $10hr+ were using software. Care is needed as to what software you do use, as each site has their own specific rules about what is allowed.
Ah, so its a lot like online gaming. But maybe worse as it wont be possible to stop external software. Plus £s are on the line so the incentives much higher than say counter strike?.
Pokerstars were very good at stopping external software but it was an arms race between cheaters and their integrity department with both being on top at times and both losing at times.
Certain types of eternal software are allowed, and others aren't.
HUDs that do basic figures are allowed on some sites. The one bit of external software I've downloaded is a free-to-use HUD that simply shows the opposing players VPIP (% of hands they voluntary paid to go into a hand), PFR (% of time they raised pre-flop) and how many hands knowledge you have of them. I know other players will be using much more professional HUDs but I don't want to pay for one.
The one time that came in useful was I raised with AQ pre-flop and an opposing player pushed all in. I could see they'd only played 5% of hands at that time. Someone else called, I folded. They had AA. Someone only playing 5% of hands is only playing with the very best hands so avoid them. If someone's playing 50% of hands then they're a fish you can get value from.
One of Starmer or Johnson doesn’t understand the care proposals.
It has been the case that the home is only sold on death to pay care costs
Actually, I think under present system that is up to the local council in question. They have to agree to defer until death.
I do not know of anyone having to sell their home while they are alive
Of course it may be the home is sold as they do not live in it, but I would ask if anybody has any experience of a home owner having to sell to pay their care costs while they are alive
The PM didn’t say anything about qualifying his statement because the house isn’t sold to pay for care until after death.
Nor did the Tory manifesto qualify its promise in that way.
Indeed, didn’t the whole issue arise because Mrs May proposed to use the proceeds of people’s homes, sold after death? Hence the ‘death tax’?
People in that position are more worried about their inheritance than having somewhere to live - their being in care generally being a one way street.
The literal wording from the manifesto is "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " If that isn't about the inheritance left to pass on to their kids then what is it?
The whole reason for the reform is to stop someone's entire assets being swallowed up by care costs so that there is nothing left to inherit. And the PM stood up and repeatedly said that nobody would have to sell their home because the home is not counted as an asset. This is simply wrong. He either doesn't know his own policy or he is lying about it.
Question - how many of the red wallers are going to accept your attempts at sophistry and go "fair enough, I'm being taxed heavily so that I don't lose my home, but I'm going to lose it anyway whilst the well off dont. yes of course the Tories still have my vote".
Northerners are not stupid.
The PM said "nobody would have to sell their home" which is true. They have the option of selling it or not selling it with payments due being paid after death.
In addition there are situations where the main home is exempt anyway: at home care, spouse still living in the house, other relative over 60 living in house, any relative of any age still living in the house etc etc.
If you need to pay £86k and of your £100k assets almost all of it is your home, where exactly are you to get the money other than from the sale of the home?
Yes we know its payable after death - its the dementia death tax which removes inheritance. So why did he said "you don't need to sell your home" when you do? And if you definitely don't need to, why didn't the Solicitor General firmly put Jo Coburn back in her box on the telly just now?
When you go into a care home you do not need to sell your home. Obviously there is accountability after death but what do you expect? That taxpayers cover everything when wealth in property can be used to cover some of the cost? You are misrepresenting things for party political reasons. As Starmer did earlier. And as the media did re: May's plans.
Social Care is important. We must stick to the facts. Below is a worked example from the published proposals which is not too dissimilar from yours.
"Yusuf is in his late 70s. He has lived on his own since his wife died from cancer ten years ago. When she died, he downsized from their family home in Hastings to a smaller property worth £180,000. As a result, he has £70,000 in savings.
Yusuf develops dementia, can no longer cope at home and needs to move into residential care. His underlying health is good and he ultimately spends eight years living at the residential home. Yusuf's care home costs £700 per week. Under the current system, Yusuf would spend about £293,000 on his care from his assets and his income, and as a result only have £72,000 left in assets.
Under the new system, Yusuf hits the £86,000 cap after three years and four months. He no longer needs to contribute for his personal care from either his assets or his income. Beyond this, he will only have to contribute towards daily living costs. He is now left with £173,000, almost 70 per cent of his original assets.
Over his whole care journey, Yusuf spends £123,000 less than under the current system."
Its very very simple. EVen for PB Peppa parrots.
The issue is inheritance. If you have to sell your home to pay for care - whether before or after your death - it does not pass to your children. Fear of this death tax has driven all kinds of policies and pledges. Including in this case the "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " pledge repeated by Peppa today.
This simply is not true with the new bill. And you've given the exact example that northern red wall Tories will be wapped round the head with. Reduce Yusuf's assets to £120k of which almost all is the house, and there will be no other way to pay the £86k retrospectively other than sell the house to pay for care.
Yusef in Hasting's estate is £173k. Yusuf in Hartlepool's estate is £34k. It slams working class northerners in a way that it doesn't southerners.
You mentioned the facts. Why doesn't the PM know them?
The system is the same whether you live in Hastings or Hartlepool.
Some people have more valuable houses/estates than others. This is the case now and has nothing to do with it.
You seem to be arguing that the system should be different in Hastings and Hartlepool.
It is fair to point out that this is a transfer of wealth from Hartlepool to Hastings (or more so Brighton/Guildford/London etc) as the money raised via NI will be much closer between the two, than the money saved by those needing care. It is the opposite of levelling up.
The average Tory voter could not care less about levelling up if they have to pay for it and it means more of their assets going to the tax man.
Levelling up via better infrastructure for the North is fine, levelling up at the expense of the Tory shires is not
You mean the average Epping Tory. The Tory voter in Hartlepool will beg to differ.
The average Tory voter is a home owner in the South
A lot of home-owners in the South are absolutely flabbergasted by the antics and the incompetence and corruption of this so-called Conservative government. This is not how Conservatives used to be.
I think you need to do some catching up, young HY.
One of Starmer or Johnson doesn’t understand the care proposals.
It has been the case that the home is only sold on death to pay care costs
Actually, I think under present system that is up to the local council in question. They have to agree to defer until death.
I do not know of anyone having to sell their home while they are alive
Of course it may be the home is sold as they do not live in it, but I would ask if anybody has any experience of a home owner having to sell to pay their care costs while they are alive
The PM didn’t say anything about qualifying his statement because the house isn’t sold to pay for care until after death.
Nor did the Tory manifesto qualify its promise in that way.
Indeed, didn’t the whole issue arise because Mrs May proposed to use the proceeds of people’s homes, sold after death? Hence the ‘death tax’?
People in that position are more worried about their inheritance than having somewhere to live - their being in care generally being a one way street.
The literal wording from the manifesto is "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " If that isn't about the inheritance left to pass on to their kids then what is it?
The whole reason for the reform is to stop someone's entire assets being swallowed up by care costs so that there is nothing left to inherit. And the PM stood up and repeatedly said that nobody would have to sell their home because the home is not counted as an asset. This is simply wrong. He either doesn't know his own policy or he is lying about it.
Question - how many of the red wallers are going to accept your attempts at sophistry and go "fair enough, I'm being taxed heavily so that I don't lose my home, but I'm going to lose it anyway whilst the well off dont. yes of course the Tories still have my vote".
Northerners are not stupid.
The PM said "nobody would have to sell their home" which is true. They have the option of selling it or not selling it with payments due being paid after death.
In addition there are situations where the main home is exempt anyway: at home care, spouse still living in the house, other relative over 60 living in house, any relative of any age still living in the house etc etc.
If you need to pay £86k and of your £100k assets almost all of it is your home, where exactly are you to get the money other than from the sale of the home?
Yes we know its payable after death - its the dementia death tax which removes inheritance. So why did he said "you don't need to sell your home" when you do? And if you definitely don't need to, why didn't the Solicitor General firmly put Jo Coburn back in her box on the telly just now?
It won't play well in a country obsessed with property wealth and inheritance but legally and logically selling a home after you have died is not selling your home. Once you are dead, it temporarily belongs to your estate then the beneficiaries.
Or doesn't because it will have been sold to pay for your residential care home care...
Then the house is not your home - the care home is.
It's, really dickishly, strictly true.
Like the " "new" "hospitals" ".
If you have been consigned to a care home, I fail to see the need to keep a house.
What is it for?
It's a sacred tenet of Conservatism that it has to be handed over to the offspring. Vide the structure of IHT which disproportionately favours wealth held in a house - you can use the main allowance to offset the worth of a house, as with any asset, but you can't use unused Nil Residence Band to offset tax on other assets.
Edit: and to permit that, the house has to be handed over to the children.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Do you have an edge, or was it mainly luck/variance?
That is the crucial question to ask yourself. Many (most?) punters mistake the two after a big win or heavy loss. Be honest with yourself about whether or not you have an edge.
I don’t play poker so can’t advise further.
Against all my instincts, I started playing slots a few weeks ago and lost a fair chunk of change. I’m really pissed off with myself because I know slots don’t have an edge. Grr. Stupid me. Even if I had won, it would still have been stupid to play.
It is close to impossible to have an edge in your first online poker tournament, but if you can win that, then you have a reasonable chance of being able to develop an edge if you put the hours in to both playing and learning.
How much advantage does software give you for online play?
I have not been active for a few years but even back then I'd say 95%+ of players earning $10hr+ were using software. Care is needed as to what software you do use, as each site has their own specific rules about what is allowed.
Ah, so its a lot like online gaming. But maybe worse as it wont be possible to stop external software. Plus £s are on the line so the incentives much higher than say counter strike?.
Pokerstars were very good at stopping external software but it was an arms race between cheaters and their integrity department with both being on top at times and both losing at times.
Surely now just screen capture or even video and AI would be enough?
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
One of Starmer or Johnson doesn’t understand the care proposals.
It has been the case that the home is only sold on death to pay care costs
Actually, I think under present system that is up to the local council in question. They have to agree to defer until death.
I do not know of anyone having to sell their home while they are alive
Of course it may be the home is sold as they do not live in it, but I would ask if anybody has any experience of a home owner having to sell to pay their care costs while they are alive
The PM didn’t say anything about qualifying his statement because the house isn’t sold to pay for care until after death.
Nor did the Tory manifesto qualify its promise in that way.
Indeed, didn’t the whole issue arise because Mrs May proposed to use the proceeds of people’s homes, sold after death? Hence the ‘death tax’?
People in that position are more worried about their inheritance than having somewhere to live - their being in care generally being a one way street.
The literal wording from the manifesto is "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " If that isn't about the inheritance left to pass on to their kids then what is it?
The whole reason for the reform is to stop someone's entire assets being swallowed up by care costs so that there is nothing left to inherit. And the PM stood up and repeatedly said that nobody would have to sell their home because the home is not counted as an asset. This is simply wrong. He either doesn't know his own policy or he is lying about it.
Question - how many of the red wallers are going to accept your attempts at sophistry and go "fair enough, I'm being taxed heavily so that I don't lose my home, but I'm going to lose it anyway whilst the well off dont. yes of course the Tories still have my vote".
Northerners are not stupid.
The PM said "nobody would have to sell their home" which is true. They have the option of selling it or not selling it with payments due being paid after death.
In addition there are situations where the main home is exempt anyway: at home care, spouse still living in the house, other relative over 60 living in house, any relative of any age still living in the house etc etc.
If you need to pay £86k and of your £100k assets almost all of it is your home, where exactly are you to get the money other than from the sale of the home?
Yes we know its payable after death - its the dementia death tax which removes inheritance. So why did he said "you don't need to sell your home" when you do? And if you definitely don't need to, why didn't the Solicitor General firmly put Jo Coburn back in her box on the telly just now?
When you go into a care home you do not need to sell your home. Obviously there is accountability after death but what do you expect? That taxpayers cover everything when wealth in property can be used to cover some of the cost? You are misrepresenting things for party political reasons. As Starmer did earlier. And as the media did re: May's plans.
Social Care is important. We must stick to the facts. Below is a worked example from the published proposals which is not too dissimilar from yours.
"Yusuf is in his late 70s. He has lived on his own since his wife died from cancer ten years ago. When she died, he downsized from their family home in Hastings to a smaller property worth £180,000. As a result, he has £70,000 in savings.
Yusuf develops dementia, can no longer cope at home and needs to move into residential care. His underlying health is good and he ultimately spends eight years living at the residential home. Yusuf's care home costs £700 per week. Under the current system, Yusuf would spend about £293,000 on his care from his assets and his income, and as a result only have £72,000 left in assets.
Under the new system, Yusuf hits the £86,000 cap after three years and four months. He no longer needs to contribute for his personal care from either his assets or his income. Beyond this, he will only have to contribute towards daily living costs. He is now left with £173,000, almost 70 per cent of his original assets.
Over his whole care journey, Yusuf spends £123,000 less than under the current system."
Its very very simple. EVen for PB Peppa parrots.
The issue is inheritance. If you have to sell your home to pay for care - whether before or after your death - it does not pass to your children. Fear of this death tax has driven all kinds of policies and pledges. Including in this case the "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it. " pledge repeated by Peppa today.
This simply is not true with the new bill. And you've given the exact example that northern red wall Tories will be wapped round the head with. Reduce Yusuf's assets to £120k of which almost all is the house, and there will be no other way to pay the £86k retrospectively other than sell the house to pay for care.
Yusef in Hasting's estate is £173k. Yusuf in Hartlepool's estate is £34k. It slams working class northerners in a way that it doesn't southerners.
You mentioned the facts. Why doesn't the PM know them?
The system is the same whether you live in Hastings or Hartlepool.
Some people have more valuable houses/estates than others. This is the case now and has nothing to do with it.
You seem to be arguing that the system should be different in Hastings and Hartlepool.
It is fair to point out that this is a transfer of wealth from Hartlepool to Hastings (or more so Brighton/Guildford/London etc) as the money raised via NI will be much closer between the two, than the money saved by those needing care. It is the opposite of levelling up.
The average Tory voter could not care less about levelling up if they have to pay for it and it means more of their assets going to the tax man.
Levelling up via better infrastructure for the North is fine, levelling up at the expense of the Tory shires is not
I thought the transport infrastructure for the North, or at least North East, was cancelled last week?
You can improve transport infrastucture in the North without destroying homes in rural shires and massive noise pollution via HS2
I hate to break it to you: but noise from high-speed railways is much less than from motorways. In fact, they can be quieter than conventional railway lines, even at higher speeds.
Is that also true of electric cars ?
That's a really interesting question, and I don't know.
My *guess* would be that, for motorways, tyre noise is far greater than the contributions from engine or aero effects. But that's just a WAG.
I don't know either, but every road planning decision should now have electric as a default rather than ICE as that is the direction we are inexorably trending toward (No point putting fuel duty up or down particularly in the long run now)
I just found this:
"Noise of rolling tires driving on pavement is found to be the biggest contributor of highway noise and increases with higher vehicle speeds."
and
"Traffic operations noise is affected significantly by vehicle speeds, since sound energy roughly doubles for each increment of ten miles an hour in vehicle velocity; an exception to this rule occurs at very low speeds where braking and acceleration noise dominate over aerodynamic noise."
Yes - this is why there are 50 and 60 limits on some urban motorway sections (for noise mitigation).
There's a large area of open space here in the Flatlands a long way from anywhere but even in the middle of it the distant road noise from the M18 is very audible.
They use sound baffles on a lot of highways in the Netherlands. Not sure why we don't do so here.
Road surface matters as well: there is a stretch of the A50 to the west of Uttoxeter that has/used to have a concrete surface: the noise is much louder from inside the car and outside than the neighbouring tarmac sections.
(Nerd factoid alert: when it was built in the 1990s, it was supposed to be the first composite stretch of main road in the UK: a concrete subbase with tarmac wearing surface. For some reason they abandoned the idea and made it concrete.)
The A1(M) is 1 mile away from here as the crow flies. At night, with a window open you can hear it alongside the town clock (again a mile or so away).
They've been trialling solar noise barriers in various places. Seems like a good idea (even if you don't always get the right orientation for the panel).
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
There's no hubris, Leon. The data is stacking up, the FT article broke it down pretty well too. A couple of weeks ago I remember saying on here the key difference for the UK will be the 7-9m infections among the unvaccinated cohort from the end of May to the beginning of November (by ONS data). I'm now even more convinced that is the case. There are just too few susceptible people left in the UK barring a completely immunity evading variant.
I'm not arguing with any of your data, just fearful of your slightly hubristic tone of voice. Cause Covid does have a horrible tendency to whack those who gloat or declare victory, even in the faintest way
So far so good. Let's pray it continues
Yes, that's very much my view. As you have said, Covid has a habit of biting those who think they have it beat on the butt. And we're going into a period where people are going to be spending a lot of time in very close proximity to each other, drinking, socialising, etc.
🥳
Nothings going to stop us this year! Says the governments ad campaign. Or is it Tesco’s?
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
We've done OK historically, but are currently looking pretty good, because we've managed (so far) to remove restrictions without suffering a massive wave.
I can't help be concerned, though.
I am in London right now, and the temperature is dropping and *everyone* (including most of the members of this board) appear extremely unconcerned.
Now, there are lots of good reasons to be optimistic - we've eliminated children (mostly) as a transmission vector, we're ahead of the curve on boosters, and we allowed a lot of people to get the disease over the summer.
But lots of EU countries have had reason to be optimistic too: they have more restrictions, they gave their vaccines more recently, and the preponderance of data is that Pfizer offers greater protection. And yet they're increasingly being hammered too.
I suspect that we will see soaring cases in the next few weeks. The only question is whether those soaring cases result in hospitalisations or not. I hope that they will not, but am far from convinced.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
There's no hubris, Leon. The data is stacking up, the FT article broke it down pretty well too. A couple of weeks ago I remember saying on here the key difference for the UK will be the 7-9m infections among the unvaccinated cohort from the end of May to the beginning of November (by ONS data). I'm now even more convinced that is the case. There are just too few susceptible people left in the UK barring a completely immunity evading variant.
I'm not arguing with any of your data, just fearful of your slightly hubristic tone of voice. Cause Covid does have a horrible tendency to whack those who gloat or declare victory, even in the faintest way
So far so good. Let's pray it continues
Covid is a virus, not a judgemental moral crusader that punishes the confident and rewards the meek.
Absolutely. And the reason the lizards controlling the world governments invented and released the virus is to kill off the subset of humans who believe absolutely every crackpot theory posted on the internet, because this group of humans voting irrationally in elections are harming the lizards control of everything!
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Do you have an edge, or was it mainly luck/variance?
That is the crucial question to ask yourself. Many (most?) punters mistake the two after a big win or heavy loss. Be honest with yourself about whether or not you have an edge.
I don’t play poker so can’t advise further.
Against all my instincts, I started playing slots a few weeks ago and lost a fair chunk of change. I’m really pissed off with myself because I know slots don’t have an edge. Grr. Stupid me. Even if I had won, it would still have been stupid to play.
It is close to impossible to have an edge in your first online poker tournament, but if you can win that, then you have a reasonable chance of being able to develop an edge if you put the hours in to both playing and learning.
How much advantage does software give you for online play?
I have not been active for a few years but even back then I'd say 95%+ of players earning $10hr+ were using software. Care is needed as to what software you do use, as each site has their own specific rules about what is allowed.
Ah, so its a lot like online gaming. But maybe worse as it wont be possible to stop external software. Plus £s are on the line so the incentives much higher than say counter strike?.
Pokerstars were very good at stopping external software but it was an arms race between cheaters and their integrity department with both being on top at times and both losing at times.
Surely now just screen capture or even video and AI would be enough?
There are multiple ways of catching cheating. Patterns of play, off line links between players etc. Anyone earning enough to make it worthwhile will be investigated.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
There's no hubris, Leon. The data is stacking up, the FT article broke it down pretty well too. A couple of weeks ago I remember saying on here the key difference for the UK will be the 7-9m infections among the unvaccinated cohort from the end of May to the beginning of November (by ONS data). I'm now even more convinced that is the case. There are just too few susceptible people left in the UK barring a completely immunity evading variant.
I'm not arguing with any of your data, just fearful of your slightly hubristic tone of voice. Cause Covid does have a horrible tendency to whack those who gloat or declare victory, even in the faintest way
So far so good. Let's pray it continues
Yes, that's very much my view. As you have said, Covid has a habit of biting those who think they have it beat on the butt. And we're going into a period where people are going to be spending a lot of time in very close proximity to each other, drinking, socialising, etc.
I'm sorry Robert, the virus isn't sentient. This is simply a conclusion from the available data on infections, two dose vaccinations and booster shots.
I've got a few minutes until my next bloody meeting so I'll waste that time laying out my reasoning.
1. By the 18th of December (a week before Xmas) ~25m people will have had their third vaccine dose, that takes around 23m people completely out of circulation as potential viral hosts. 2. In addition a further 22m people have had two doses of vaccine, most of them Pfizer/Moderna given the age cohorts not eligible for boosters, that takes another 13m people out of circulation as potential viral hosts (probably more, but lets be conservative). 3. Since the reopening in July around 11m people will have been infected with COVID by the 18th of December, we know that a constant of 80% of infections are in people without any antibodies, I think this has been shown not just here, but in the US as well. That makes around 8-9m people who were in the zero immunity cohort now have a very high degree of immunity (~85% efficacy against any kind of reinfection, potentially higher for people who have recovered from Delta). That's ~7m people who are simply out of the viral funnel.
Adding those up we have somewhere around 42-44m people in the UK who will be basically immune to COVID in the run up to Xmas and a further 9-11m who will make for substandard hosts because they have some level of immunity from either a single dose of vaccine or two doses that have waned sufficiently to allow for a low grade infection. The potential for a runaway epidemic in the UK is now very low, and the key difference here vs Europe is that 11m people who got it/will get it from July to Xmas.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
We've done OK historically, but are currently looking pretty good, because we've managed (so far) to remove restrictions without suffering a massive wave.
I can't help be concerned, though.
I am in London right now, and the temperature is dropping and *everyone* (including most of the members of this board) appear extremely unconcerned.
Now, there are lots of good reasons to be optimistic - we've eliminated children (mostly) as a transmission vector, we're ahead of the curve on boosters, and we allowed a lot of people to get the disease over the summer.
But lots of EU countries have had reason to be optimistic too: they have more restrictions, they gave their vaccines more recently, and the preponderance of data is that Pfizer offers greater protection. And yet they're increasingly being hammered too.
I suspect that we will see soaring cases in the next few weeks. The only question is whether those soaring cases result in hospitalisations or not. I hope that they will not, but am far from convinced.
If there is one thing I have learned from the last two years of following COVID closely, it is not to make predictions about what will happen next.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
We've done OK historically, but are currently looking pretty good, because we've managed (so far) to remove restrictions without suffering a massive wave.
I can't help be concerned, though.
I am in London right now, and the temperature is dropping and *everyone* (including most of the members of this board) appear extremely unconcerned.
Now, there are lots of good reasons to be optimistic - we've eliminated children (mostly) as a transmission vector, we're ahead of the curve on boosters, and we allowed a lot of people to get the disease over the summer.
But lots of EU countries have had reason to be optimistic too: they have more restrictions, they gave their vaccines more recently, and the preponderance of data is that Pfizer offers greater protection. And yet they're increasingly being hammered too.
I suspect that we will see soaring cases in the next few weeks. The only question is whether those soaring cases result in hospitalisations or not. I hope that they will not, but am far from convinced.
If there is one thing I have learned from the last two years of following COVID closely, it is not to make predictions about what will happen next.
My predictions improved immensely when I started making them about what happened before.
Taiwan is on the list, good! Turkey is not, Controversial!
Kuwait is not which does surprise me.
any other surprises?
I see Pakistan on the list but not Bangladesh. Malaysia, but not Thailand or Singapore. There's probably a lot of global politics I'm behind on. No Bhutan?
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
It is not something I have ever seen on a US street in person, but I have witnessed in person at LHR.
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Cool turquoise gloves
Sell the scope and invest in hands free for the walkie talkies? throat mikes are good....
Taiwan is on the list, good! Turkey is not, Controversial!
Kuwait is not which does surprise me.
any other surprises?
I see Pakistan on the list but not Bangladesh. Malaysia, but not Thailand or Singapore. There's probably a lot of global politics I'm behind on. No Bhutan?
This is a State Department event, and the list is of countries that have been invited to attend by State Department. As such, I think it reflects internal State Department priorities and alliances, rather than a straightforward snapshot of the state of world democracy.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
Given the relative spends on health care that would be a +1 for the NHS
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
It is not something I have ever seen on a US street in person, but I have witnessed in person at LHR.
UK has 'led the world' on how to approach pandemic measurements, says WHO programme director Dr Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies programme, said the UK has “led the world” on how to approach measurement of pandemics.
He told the WHO media briefing (see also 15:07): “The UK has really led the world in how to look at data, how to do excellent analytics, how to give context and get insights for disease control”.
He said that governments need to move away from “blunt percentages” to “individuals” that have been missed in terms of targeting who needs to be vaccinated.
Yup, the equivalent of the top of the range camera that catches every angle of a car crash with amazing precision, and detail. But does nothing to avert it.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
We've done OK historically, but are currently looking pretty good, because we've managed (so far) to remove restrictions without suffering a massive wave.
I can't help be concerned, though.
I am in London right now, and the temperature is dropping and *everyone* (including most of the members of this board) appear extremely unconcerned.
Now, there are lots of good reasons to be optimistic - we've eliminated children (mostly) as a transmission vector, we're ahead of the curve on boosters, and we allowed a lot of people to get the disease over the summer.
But lots of EU countries have had reason to be optimistic too: they have more restrictions, they gave their vaccines more recently, and the preponderance of data is that Pfizer offers greater protection. And yet they're increasingly being hammered too.
I suspect that we will see soaring cases in the next few weeks. The only question is whether those soaring cases result in hospitalisations or not. I hope that they will not, but am far from convinced.
The most plausible reason for this was posted today - from the analysis in the FT.
Numbers of elderly people in various parts of Europe didn't get the vaccine. Because of the vastly higher probabilities of server illness and death among the old, this creates a vulnerability.
I got some stick on here, for pointing out, during the early days of the vaccination campaign, that even if you got to 90% double vaxed, that leaves a lot of vulnerable people. If you plug in CFR numbers (which I did) - you get a serious medical problem.....
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
We've done OK historically, but are currently looking pretty good, because we've managed (so far) to remove restrictions without suffering a massive wave.
I can't help be concerned, though.
I am in London right now, and the temperature is dropping and *everyone* (including most of the members of this board) appear extremely unconcerned.
Now, there are lots of good reasons to be optimistic - we've eliminated children (mostly) as a transmission vector, we're ahead of the curve on boosters, and we allowed a lot of people to get the disease over the summer.
But lots of EU countries have had reason to be optimistic too: they have more restrictions, they gave their vaccines more recently, and the preponderance of data is that Pfizer offers greater protection. And yet they're increasingly being hammered too.
I suspect that we will see soaring cases in the next few weeks. The only question is whether those soaring cases result in hospitalisations or not. I hope that they will not, but am far from convinced.
The most plausible reason for this was posted today - from the analysis in the FT.
Numbers of elderly people in various parts of Europe didn't get the vaccine. Because of the vastly higher probabilities of server illness and death among the old, this creates a vulnerability.
I got some stick on here, for pointing out, during the early days of the vaccination campaign, that even if you got to 90% double vaxed, that leaves a lot of vulnerable people. If you plug in CFR numbers (which I did) - you get a serious medical problem.....
The mistake people make is looking t the 90%.
90% and 95% aren't "about the same" - its 10% unvaccinated vs 5% - i.e. twice as bad...
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
It is not something I have ever seen on a US street in person, but I have witnessed in person at LHR.
The question was what do you see from the picture. Not what is the story you can research on the internet. From the picture, it is not possible to assume they are not authorized to be in that position simply because they are not wearing a uniform that you recognize as such.
As I said, from the picture it is not possible to make additional assumptions about context etc... From other research, yes.
Personally, I am very much against open carriage of such weapons by anyone, including the police in the pursuit of their normal duties (although I can see that they are needed by the police in specific emergencies and crises)
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
It is not something I have ever seen on a US street in person, but I have witnessed in person at LHR.
The question was what do you see from the picture. Not what is the story you can research on the internet. From the picture, it is not possible to assume they are not authorized to be in that position simply because they are not wearing a uniform that you recognize as such.
As I said, from the picture it is not possible to make additional assumptions about context etc... From other research, yes.
Personally, I am very much against open carriage of such weapons by anyone, including the police in the pursuit of their normal duties (although I can see that they are needed by the police in specific emergencies and crises)
Yay! Rival groups of vigilantes walking the streets with massive rifles to supposedly protect people. Definitely safer than what we have over here.
Take out Eastern Europe though, which is poorer and didn't get vaccines until later (and in some cases used Russian vaccines)... and it's only Belgium & Italy who are worse. Italy got hit by covid first in Europe, so I'd cut them some slack.
When you consider that the UK did get ahead on the vaccinations, it's quite remarkable how badly we have done in terms of deaths.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
We've done OK historically, but are currently looking pretty good, because we've managed (so far) to remove restrictions without suffering a massive wave.
I can't help be concerned, though.
I am in London right now, and the temperature is dropping and *everyone* (including most of the members of this board) appear extremely unconcerned.
Now, there are lots of good reasons to be optimistic - we've eliminated children (mostly) as a transmission vector, we're ahead of the curve on boosters, and we allowed a lot of people to get the disease over the summer.
But lots of EU countries have had reason to be optimistic too: they have more restrictions, they gave their vaccines more recently, and the preponderance of data is that Pfizer offers greater protection. And yet they're increasingly being hammered too.
I suspect that we will see soaring cases in the next few weeks. The only question is whether those soaring cases result in hospitalisations or not. I hope that they will not, but am far from convinced.
The most plausible reason for this was posted today - from the analysis in the FT.
Numbers of elderly people in various parts of Europe didn't get the vaccine. Because of the vastly higher probabilities of server illness and death among the old, this creates a vulnerability.
I got some stick on here, for pointing out, during the early days of the vaccination campaign, that even if you got to 90% double vaxed, that leaves a lot of vulnerable people. If you plug in CFR numbers (which I did) - you get a serious medical problem.....
The mistake people make is looking t the 90%.
90% and 95% aren't "about the same" - its 10% unvaccinated vs 5% - i.e. twice as bad...
Both are a lot.
Say you have 800K in a particular UK year group.
90% is 180K people unprotected 95% is 90K unprotected
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
We've done OK historically, but are currently looking pretty good, because we've managed (so far) to remove restrictions without suffering a massive wave.
I can't help be concerned, though.
I am in London right now, and the temperature is dropping and *everyone* (including most of the members of this board) appear extremely unconcerned.
Now, there are lots of good reasons to be optimistic - we've eliminated children (mostly) as a transmission vector, we're ahead of the curve on boosters, and we allowed a lot of people to get the disease over the summer.
But lots of EU countries have had reason to be optimistic too: they have more restrictions, they gave their vaccines more recently, and the preponderance of data is that Pfizer offers greater protection. And yet they're increasingly being hammered too.
I suspect that we will see soaring cases in the next few weeks. The only question is whether those soaring cases result in hospitalisations or not. I hope that they will not, but am far from convinced.
The most plausible reason for this was posted today - from the analysis in the FT.
Numbers of elderly people in various parts of Europe didn't get the vaccine. Because of the vastly higher probabilities of server illness and death among the old, this creates a vulnerability.
I got some stick on here, for pointing out, during the early days of the vaccination campaign, that even if you got to 90% double vaxed, that leaves a lot of vulnerable people. If you plug in CFR numbers (which I did) - you get a serious medical problem.....
The mistake people make is looking t the 90%.
90% and 95% aren't "about the same" - its 10% unvaccinated vs 5% - i.e. twice as bad...
Almost as if Bayes' theorem is not a hypothesis about snooker playing surfaces.
The most plausible reason for this was posted today - from the analysis in the FT.
Numbers of elderly people in various parts of Europe didn't get the vaccine. Because of the vastly higher probabilities of server illness and death among the old, this creates a vulnerability.
[snip]
Yes, this is surely right, and is a pretty obvious point, but one which is often missed, The UK's record on the total number of those double-jabbed is nothing special, but we got three things right: we started early, we extended the interval between the first two doses so as to get protection for higher numbers early on in the programme, and (most importantly) we systematically prioritised vaccinating the right people. We've also done better than many other countries in getting on with boosters, again for the right people.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
That's great, congratulations!
I used to play a lot online and in my local pub, partly because my training in statistics is useful and partly just for fun (and in the case of the pub games socialising with people with a different background to my usual circle) - like you I reckon that paying up to $20 for an interesting evening is worthwhile and if you win that's a bonus. I now play less as I'm too busy with other stuff and I do lose on average over time, but still enjoy it now and then.
A key point is i think that the games have a huge variance, and even a really good player can have a run of 30 tournaments in which they get knocked out every time. The usual structure is that you cash if you're in the top 10%, but only make a significant profit in the top 2% or so. So you need both a willingness to accept 30 losses of whatever stake you play at without feeling demoralised, and the phlegmatic attitude that keeps you playing carefully and avoiding the oh-sod-it gambles that tempt people who've lost too often.
And sometimes one's just been lucky and one isn't really that good. My Labour agent in 1997 retired as an agent after he won £100,000 in a national tournament - ha, he thought, this beats the hell out of inputting canvass sheets, I'll be a full-time player. Two years later, he had never won another tournament, and gave up.
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
It is not something I have ever seen on a US street in person, but I have witnessed in person at LHR.
The question was what do you see from the picture. Not what is the story you can research on the internet. From the picture, it is not possible to assume they are not authorized to be in that position simply because they are not wearing a uniform that you recognize as such.
As I said, from the picture it is not possible to make additional assumptions about context etc... From other research, yes.
Personally, I am very much against open carriage of such weapons by anyone, including the police in the pursuit of their normal duties (although I can see that they are needed by the police in specific emergencies and crises)
Yay! Rival groups of vigilantes walking the streets with massive rifles to supposedly protect people. Definitely safer than what we have over here.
Glad you are still able to deliberately misread what people have written to serve your own virtue signalling.
I'm sorry Robert, the virus isn't sentient. [snip]
The virus isn't sentient, but people get complacent, which is why it looks as though it's punishing hubris.
Which is fine, but I don't think the UK is being complacent, the scale and breadth of the third dose/booster programme is very good evidence of the opposite. I'd suggest that it was European countries from July to now that have been extremely complacent, they almost uniformly assumed that if they went into winter with a few thousand cases per day and NPIs it would protect them from the kind of take off in infections they've seen over the last two weeks. The UK approach of building natural immunity and taking the unvaccinated exit wave in the summer/autumn was simply dismissed as a "dangerous experiment" by far, far too many scientists and officials across the continent. There was, and still is, a lot of sound reasoning and science behind that decision to fully unlockdown in July, it was a calculated risk that we wouldn't have this under control by Xmas so lets move to endemicity from day 0 of being fully reopen.
Once again, and I know you aren't defending the European approach here, I'd like to ask the question - NPIs simply displace infections into the future, what's the use of having them when the available PIs aren't going to change very much in said future? There was never a scenario of having a miracle pill that makes everyone immune to COVID forever being developed from July to now, so why delay?
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
It is not something I have ever seen on a US street in person, but I have witnessed in person at LHR.
The question was what do you see from the picture. Not what is the story you can research on the internet. From the picture, it is not possible to assume they are not authorized to be in that position simply because they are not wearing a uniform that you recognize as such.
As I said, from the picture it is not possible to make additional assumptions about context etc... From other research, yes.
Personally, I am very much against open carriage of such weapons by anyone, including the police in the pursuit of their normal duties (although I can see that they are needed by the police in specific emergencies and crises)
Yay! Rival groups of vigilantes walking the streets with massive rifles to supposedly protect people. Definitely safer than what we have over here.
They are not massive rifles. In fact pretty much the lightest rifles out there (saving for the inevitable 22 LR)
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
It is not something I have ever seen on a US street in person, but I have witnessed in person at LHR.
The question was what do you see from the picture. Not what is the story you can research on the internet. From the picture, it is not possible to assume they are not authorized to be in that position simply because they are not wearing a uniform that you recognize as such.
As I said, from the picture it is not possible to make additional assumptions about context etc... From other research, yes.
Personally, I am very much against open carriage of such weapons by anyone, including the police in the pursuit of their normal duties (although I can see that they are needed by the police in specific emergencies and crises)
Yay! Rival groups of vigilantes walking the streets with massive rifles to supposedly protect people. Definitely safer than what we have over here.
They are not massive rifles. In fact pretty much the lightest rifles out there (saving for the inevitable 22 LR)
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
We've done OK historically, but are currently looking pretty good, because we've managed (so far) to remove restrictions without suffering a massive wave.
I can't help be concerned, though.
I am in London right now, and the temperature is dropping and *everyone* (including most of the members of this board) appear extremely unconcerned.
Now, there are lots of good reasons to be optimistic - we've eliminated children (mostly) as a transmission vector, we're ahead of the curve on boosters, and we allowed a lot of people to get the disease over the summer.
But lots of EU countries have had reason to be optimistic too: they have more restrictions, they gave their vaccines more recently, and the preponderance of data is that Pfizer offers greater protection. And yet they're increasingly being hammered too.
I suspect that we will see soaring cases in the next few weeks. The only question is whether those soaring cases result in hospitalisations or not. I hope that they will not, but am far from convinced.
The most plausible reason for this was posted today - from the analysis in the FT.
Numbers of elderly people in various parts of Europe didn't get the vaccine. Because of the vastly higher probabilities of server illness and death among the old, this creates a vulnerability.
I got some stick on here, for pointing out, during the early days of the vaccination campaign, that even if you got to 90% double vaxed, that leaves a lot of vulnerable people. If you plug in CFR numbers (which I did) - you get a serious medical problem.....
The mistake people make is looking t the 90%.
90% and 95% aren't "about the same" - its 10% unvaccinated vs 5% - i.e. twice as bad...
That is a very important point that is often missed.
With that said, there's clearly an upper limit to it. 99.9% and 99.99% are a difference of 10x from that perspective, but both would be highly unlikely to see sustained outbreaks.
Confirmed cases isn't all that useful a comparison. According to the Economist Bulgaria's excess deaths are 80% higher than confirmed cases, Romania 60% higher, Slovakia 50% higher, Croatia 50% higher, Lithuania 100% higher, Poland 70% higher, Latvia 50% higher and so on. So that chart paints a rosier picture than reality.
And Europe is relatively good at recording covid deaths, bits of Asia, Africa, and South America are worse still with many countries seeing excess deaths several times larger than attributed to covid.
The current excess death estimate is now at 17.4 million.
The most plausible reason for this was posted today - from the analysis in the FT.
Numbers of elderly people in various parts of Europe didn't get the vaccine. Because of the vastly higher probabilities of server illness and death among the old, this creates a vulnerability.
[snip]
Yes, this is surely right, and is a pretty obvious point, but one which is often missed, The UK's record on the total number of those double-jabbed is nothing special, but we got three things right: we started early, we extended the interval between the first two doses so as to get protection for higher numbers early on in the programme, and (most importantly) we systematically prioritised vaccinating the right people. We've also done better than many other countries in getting on with boosters, again for the right people.
Whilst we seem to have plenty to be critical about, it's almost surprising that the advisers and government proved willing to take some calculated risks like extending the dosage period and opening in the summer. I remember the former sounded crazy to me but once explained it made sense that it was worth the risk and it wasnt some hail Mary idea.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
We've done OK historically, but are currently looking pretty good, because we've managed (so far) to remove restrictions without suffering a massive wave.
I can't help be concerned, though.
I am in London right now, and the temperature is dropping and *everyone* (including most of the members of this board) appear extremely unconcerned.
Now, there are lots of good reasons to be optimistic - we've eliminated children (mostly) as a transmission vector, we're ahead of the curve on boosters, and we allowed a lot of people to get the disease over the summer.
But lots of EU countries have had reason to be optimistic too: they have more restrictions, they gave their vaccines more recently, and the preponderance of data is that Pfizer offers greater protection. And yet they're increasingly being hammered too.
I suspect that we will see soaring cases in the next few weeks. The only question is whether those soaring cases result in hospitalisations or not. I hope that they will not, but am far from convinced.
The most plausible reason for this was posted today - from the analysis in the FT.
Numbers of elderly people in various parts of Europe didn't get the vaccine. Because of the vastly higher probabilities of server illness and death among the old, this creates a vulnerability.
I got some stick on here, for pointing out, during the early days of the vaccination campaign, that even if you got to 90% double vaxed, that leaves a lot of vulnerable people. If you plug in CFR numbers (which I did) - you get a serious medical problem.....
I'm sorry Robert, the virus isn't sentient. [snip]
The virus isn't sentient, but people get complacent, which is why it looks as though it's punishing hubris.
Which is fine, but I don't think the UK is being complacent, the scale and breadth of the third dose/booster programme is very good evidence of the opposite. I'd suggest that it was European countries from July to now that have been extremely complacent, they almost uniformly assumed that if they went into winter with a few thousand cases per day and NPIs it would protect them from the kind of take off in infections they've seen over the last two weeks. The UK approach of building natural immunity and taking the unvaccinated exit wave in the summer/autumn was simply dismissed as a "dangerous experiment" by far, far too many scientists and officials across the continent. There was, and still is, a lot of sound reasoning and science behind that decision to fully unlockdown in July, it was a calculated risk that we wouldn't have this under control by Xmas so lets move to endemicity from day 0 of being fully reopen.
Once again, and I know you aren't defending the European approach here, I'd like to ask the question - NPIs simply displace infections into the future, what's the use of having them when the available PIs aren't going to change very much in said future? There was never a scenario of having a miracle pill that makes everyone immune to COVID forever being developed from July to now, so why delay?
Yes, I agree with that. All the same, the way in which unlocking was done has led to thousands of avoidable deaths, on top of the tens of thousands of the winter wave last year. The blunders included abandoning mask mandates on public transport, very mixed messaging, inadequate efforts to get the younger cohorts jabbed (we were complacent on that one), unnecessary delay to getting youngsters jabbed before schools and colleges re-opened, and a total screw-up on the NHS app and Covid passes, which could have been used to re-open slightly earlier, with fewer deaths.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
Can I just thank you for your poker posts. I used to play an awful lot, and you're making me miss it
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
It is not something I have ever seen on a US street in person, but I have witnessed in person at LHR.
The question was what do you see from the picture. Not what is the story you can research on the internet. From the picture, it is not possible to assume they are not authorized to be in that position simply because they are not wearing a uniform that you recognize as such.
As I said, from the picture it is not possible to make additional assumptions about context etc... From other research, yes.
Personally, I am very much against open carriage of such weapons by anyone, including the police in the pursuit of their normal duties (although I can see that they are needed by the police in specific emergencies and crises)
Yay! Rival groups of vigilantes walking the streets with massive rifles to supposedly protect people. Definitely safer than what we have over here.
They are not massive rifles. In fact pretty much the lightest rifles out there (saving for the inevitable 22 LR)
This is a massive rifle -
That looks like a boyes anti-tank rifle.
It is, indeed. Quite good if your are hunting small panzers or railway locomotives.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Very sad. I'm afraid it was going to happen at some point. The Channel does appear to be less challenging than the Med, where the fatality rate was around 2 people per 100 attempting the crossing, despite the shipping lane and perhaps because of the shorter distance.
Take out Eastern Europe though, which is poorer and didn't get vaccines until later (and in some cases used Russian vaccines)... and it's only Belgium & Italy who are worse. Italy got hit by covid first in Europe, so I'd cut them some slack.
When you consider that the UK did get ahead on the vaccinations, it's quite remarkable how badly we have done in terms of deaths.
We were among the highest levels pre the vaccines and January 2021 was a horror show, before the vaccination campaign really took off. Our consistent level since the summer opening will also have extended the gap from some.
If my parents end up in a care home I assumed they’d sell the house to pay for it. Who do people suppose is going to otherwise?
When I were a lad there was a hospital for gentlefolk across the road from that hole - closed by Labour and sold by the Tories for housing. Plenty of other local hospitals were dealt the same hand. They should have been kept open and eased the looming dementia crisis
Because they were promised they wouldn't have to and voted accordingly.
When they read "nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it." and believed it are you suggesting they were stupid to do so?
Which is literally Starmer's attack line - you can't believe the PM's promises.
Who did they think was going to pay for them to live in a care home?! Seems crazy to me that people think their home is some kind of untouchable source of wealth, even when they need the money.
Anyone who backs IHT but gets the ump over paying for care with their equity must be crackers already
And yet IHT gives heavy financial support to the notion that the family home is in some regard a sacred asset. So [edit] what people have come to ibelieve is not quite as illogical as you feel.
Well I think it fair to want to pass your family home down without being hammered by IHT, if you die living in it, but mot if you have been borrowing against it to pay for care. Surely there is a big difference there?
It’s hardly halcyon weather on channel this time of year. And here am I sat in warm in town this afternoon drinking wine. Is it lucky I am born a tyke not a Kurd? Is there anything we can do about it? (I was actually born in Wales by accident).
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
That's great, congratulations!
I used to play a lot online and in my local pub, partly because my training in statistics is useful and partly just for fun (and in the case of the pub games socialising with people with a different background to my usual circle) - like you I reckon that paying up to $20 for an interesting evening is worthwhile and if you win that's a bonus. I now play less as I'm too busy with other stuff and I do lose on average over time, but still enjoy it now and then.
A key point is i think that the games have a huge variance, and even a really good player can have a run of 30 tournaments in which they get knocked out every time. The usual structure is that you cash if you're in the top 10%, but only make a significant profit in the top 2% or so. So you need both a willingness to accept 30 losses of whatever stake you play at without feeling demoralised, and the phlegmatic attitude that keeps you playing carefully and avoiding the oh-sod-it gambles that tempt people who've lost too often.
And sometimes one's just been lucky and one isn't really that good. My Labour agent in 1997 retired as an agent after he won £100,000 in a national tournament - ha, he thought, this beats the hell out of inputting canvass sheets, I'll be a full-time player. Two years later, he had never won another tournament, and gave up.
Yes that makes sense. I'd certainly never give up the day job, but you're right being used to (and working with) statistics is certainly an advantage. Being able to do some statistical analysis in your head really helps with rapid decision making and its something a lot of players won't have (and if they're using anything to aid with statistical analysis that is cheating and banned). Again whether that's an 'edge' or not is hard to tell. I know some people that would struggle to add up in real life who give them some cards suddenly would seem like MENSA in the way they can think.
The problem trying to actually make any money from playing as opposed to just doing it for fun is the site takes quite a high rake. 9% of the entrance fee is rake so instantly just to be breaking even, without counting for variance, you need an ~10% edge just to get past the rake.
Winning your own share of the pot on average still leaves you down. On the other hand when I was playing it was clear some people were not sensible players and had more money than sense, pushing in with duff hands then rebuying a new ticket during the rebuy period as soon as they were eliminated. In general I'm not keen on the idea of rebuys, when I've played in the past when you're out, you're out, but on the other hand if these people buying multiple tickets because they've got more money than sense are inflating the pot then that counters the rake so there's that at least.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Yes, but we made the conscious CHOICE to open up early, knowing that this would cause deaths and disease throughout the summer, but we did this because we felt it was better than continuously suppressing the virus, only to have a hideous spike in autumn, forcing us into lockdown again
See Chris Whitty's comments in early summer. He explicitly said this was the government's plan. So far, it seems like a bloody good plan. That wasn't "luck"
...and Sir Keir vehemently opposed it #johnsonvariant
"In his strongest condemnation yet of the decision to press ahead with a full reopening on Monday, Starmer said Labour did not back the move, calling it “a reckless free-for-all”.
Blaming Boris Johnson’s “character” for the confusion, Starmer said: “Labour does not support the government’s plan. Lifting all restrictions at once is reckless – and doing so when the Johnson variant is already out of control risks a summer of chaos.
“We will always support jobs and livelihoods but Johnson’s recklessness risks plunging us back into restrictions again. The government has once again lost control of this virus and lost public trust in their messaging. They need to think again on their reckless plan, before it is too late."
I'm sorry Robert, the virus isn't sentient. [snip]
The virus isn't sentient, but people get complacent, which is why it looks as though it's punishing hubris.
Which is fine, but I don't think the UK is being complacent, the scale and breadth of the third dose/booster programme is very good evidence of the opposite. I'd suggest that it was European countries from July to now that have been extremely complacent, they almost uniformly assumed that if they went into winter with a few thousand cases per day and NPIs it would protect them from the kind of take off in infections they've seen over the last two weeks. The UK approach of building natural immunity and taking the unvaccinated exit wave in the summer/autumn was simply dismissed as a "dangerous experiment" by far, far too many scientists and officials across the continent. There was, and still is, a lot of sound reasoning and science behind that decision to fully unlockdown in July, it was a calculated risk that we wouldn't have this under control by Xmas so lets move to endemicity from day 0 of being fully reopen.
Once again, and I know you aren't defending the European approach here, I'd like to ask the question - NPIs simply displace infections into the future, what's the use of having them when the available PIs aren't going to change very much in said future? There was never a scenario of having a miracle pill that makes everyone immune to COVID forever being developed from July to now, so why delay?
It's a little misleading to say that NPIs simply displace infections into the future.
Imagine a disease with an R of 2 in a population with 32 people.
It will go 1, 2, 3.8, 7.4, 14.2, 23-ish. Almost everyone gets it.
On the other hand if you impose NPIs such that R is 1, then it will go:
You can then remove NPIs, and because R is 2 and half of people have previously been infected, you won't get sustained outbreaks. In other words the NPIs allow you to settle at the level of herd immunity without blasting through it.
I'm sorry Robert, the virus isn't sentient. [snip]
The virus isn't sentient, but people get complacent, which is why it looks as though it's punishing hubris.
Which is fine, but I don't think the UK is being complacent, the scale and breadth of the third dose/booster programme is very good evidence of the opposite. I'd suggest that it was European countries from July to now that have been extremely complacent, they almost uniformly assumed that if they went into winter with a few thousand cases per day and NPIs it would protect them from the kind of take off in infections they've seen over the last two weeks. The UK approach of building natural immunity and taking the unvaccinated exit wave in the summer/autumn was simply dismissed as a "dangerous experiment" by far, far too many scientists and officials across the continent. There was, and still is, a lot of sound reasoning and science behind that decision to fully unlockdown in July, it was a calculated risk that we wouldn't have this under control by Xmas so lets move to endemicity from day 0 of being fully reopen.
Once again, and I know you aren't defending the European approach here, I'd like to ask the question - NPIs simply displace infections into the future, what's the use of having them when the available PIs aren't going to change very much in said future? There was never a scenario of having a miracle pill that makes everyone immune to COVID forever being developed from July to now, so why delay?
Yes, I agree with that. All the same, the way in which unlocking was done has led to thousands of avoidable deaths. The blunder included abandoning mask mandates on public transport, very mixed messaging, inadequate efforts to get the younger cohorts jabbed (we were complacent on that one), unnecessary delay to getting youngsters jabbed before schools and colleges re-opened, and a total screw-up on the NHS app and Covid passes, which could have been used to re-open slightly earlier, with fewer deaths.
But Richard, that doesn't follow. The reason we're in a relatively strong position is because of those things you think we did wrong. Allowing the virus to spread while vaccine immunity levels were high among older vaccinated people has built up natural immunity among the won't vaccinate cohort. The only place I'd agree would be vaccination for 12-17 year olds, which IMO, was stupidly delayed by wanky liberal scientists who wanted to give our vaccine doses away.
Once again, by December 18th the UK will have had ~11m infections of which the vast majority are among the won't vaccinate cohort. You can't achieve that by putting up the NPIs you suggest, how does a 26 year old believer in "natural immunity" get infected if they can't get into the nightclub?
As Chris Whitty said, displacing potential hospitalisations from the summer to the winter isn't a good idea. He was right and the rest of Europe should have listened to him rather than assumed crazy Brexit Britain was doing everything wrong.
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
It is not something I have ever seen on a US street in person, but I have witnessed in person at LHR.
The question was what do you see from the picture. Not what is the story you can research on the internet. From the picture, it is not possible to assume they are not authorized to be in that position simply because they are not wearing a uniform that you recognize as such.
As I said, from the picture it is not possible to make additional assumptions about context etc... From other research, yes.
Personally, I am very much against open carriage of such weapons by anyone, including the police in the pursuit of their normal duties (although I can see that they are needed by the police in specific emergencies and crises)
Yay! Rival groups of vigilantes walking the streets with massive rifles to supposedly protect people. Definitely safer than what we have over here.
They are not massive rifles. In fact pretty much the lightest rifles out there (saving for the inevitable 22 LR)
This is a massive rifle -
That looks like a boyes anti-tank rifle.
It is, indeed. Quite good if your are hunting small panzers or railway locomotives.
I try to, but traditional hobbies like that are dying out sadly.
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
It is not something I have ever seen on a US street in person, but I have witnessed in person at LHR.
The question was what do you see from the picture. Not what is the story you can research on the internet. From the picture, it is not possible to assume they are not authorized to be in that position simply because they are not wearing a uniform that you recognize as such.
As I said, from the picture it is not possible to make additional assumptions about context etc... From other research, yes.
Personally, I am very much against open carriage of such weapons by anyone, including the police in the pursuit of their normal duties (although I can see that they are needed by the police in specific emergencies and crises)
Yay! Rival groups of vigilantes walking the streets with massive rifles to supposedly protect people. Definitely safer than what we have over here.
They are not massive rifles. In fact pretty much the lightest rifles out there (saving for the inevitable 22 LR)
This is a massive rifle -
That looks like a boyes anti-tank rifle.
It is, indeed. Quite good if your are hunting small panzers or railway locomotives.
One of the things I see a few of scattered about around here - and most people probably never notice - are the concrete bases of WW2 spigot mortars. There's a skeletal one - with the concrete knocked out of it - outside the fire station in the village of Potton that looks weirdly sculptural.
I'm sorry Robert, the virus isn't sentient. [snip]
The virus isn't sentient, but people get complacent, which is why it looks as though it's punishing hubris.
Which is fine, but I don't think the UK is being complacent, the scale and breadth of the third dose/booster programme is very good evidence of the opposite. I'd suggest that it was European countries from July to now that have been extremely complacent, they almost uniformly assumed that if they went into winter with a few thousand cases per day and NPIs it would protect them from the kind of take off in infections they've seen over the last two weeks. The UK approach of building natural immunity and taking the unvaccinated exit wave in the summer/autumn was simply dismissed as a "dangerous experiment" by far, far too many scientists and officials across the continent. There was, and still is, a lot of sound reasoning and science behind that decision to fully unlockdown in July, it was a calculated risk that we wouldn't have this under control by Xmas so lets move to endemicity from day 0 of being fully reopen.
Once again, and I know you aren't defending the European approach here, I'd like to ask the question - NPIs simply displace infections into the future, what's the use of having them when the available PIs aren't going to change very much in said future? There was never a scenario of having a miracle pill that makes everyone immune to COVID forever being developed from July to now, so why delay?
Yes, I agree with that. All the same, the way in which unlocking was done has led to thousands of avoidable deaths, on top of the tens of thousands of the winter wave last year. The blunders included abandoning mask mandates on public transport, very mixed messaging, inadequate efforts to get the younger cohorts jabbed (we were complacent on that one), unnecessary delay to getting youngsters jabbed before schools and colleges re-opened, and a total screw-up on the NHS app and Covid passes, which could have been used to re-open slightly earlier, with fewer deaths.
Those deaths would only have been avoided if people had been vaccinated if we'd retained masks or used vaccine passports. Otherwise they would only have been delayed, either to the winter (when there would be more pressure on hospitals, so perhaps more deaths due to triage), or to spring next year.
The avoidable deaths were those last winter, when Johnson messed up trying to save Christmas even though we knew the vaccine cavalry was coming.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Yes, but we made the conscious CHOICE to open up early, knowing that this would cause deaths and disease throughout the summer, but we did this because we felt it was better than continuously suppressing the virus, only to have a hideous spike in autumn, forcing us into lockdown again
See Chris Whitty's comments in early summer. He explicitly said this was the government's plan. So far, it seems like a bloody good plan. That wasn't "luck"
...and Sir Keir vehemently opposed it #johnsonvariant
"In his strongest condemnation yet of the decision to press ahead with a full reopening on Monday, Starmer said Labour did not back the move, calling it “a reckless free-for-all”.
Blaming Boris Johnson’s “character” for the confusion, Starmer said: “Labour does not support the government’s plan. Lifting all restrictions at once is reckless – and doing so when the Johnson variant is already out of control risks a summer of chaos.
“We will always support jobs and livelihoods but Johnson’s recklessness risks plunging us back into restrictions again. The government has once again lost control of this virus and lost public trust in their messaging. They need to think again on their reckless plan, before it is too late."
I think there's a fair argument that Starmer and Labour backed the government over Covid measures on a few occasions when opposition might have been better (with or without hindsight), and opposed them at times when the government have been proved correct.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
1 pack of cards.
8 players on the table (his example, 9 in most of mine). Each player is dealt two cards.
What are the odds one player gets a pair of aces and another a pair of kings? What are the odds that three players each hold a pair: ace, king and queen respectively.
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
It is not something I have ever seen on a US street in person, but I have witnessed in person at LHR.
The question was what do you see from the picture. Not what is the story you can research on the internet. From the picture, it is not possible to assume they are not authorized to be in that position simply because they are not wearing a uniform that you recognize as such.
As I said, from the picture it is not possible to make additional assumptions about context etc... From other research, yes.
Personally, I am very much against open carriage of such weapons by anyone, including the police in the pursuit of their normal duties (although I can see that they are needed by the police in specific emergencies and crises)
Yay! Rival groups of vigilantes walking the streets with massive rifles to supposedly protect people. Definitely safer than what we have over here.
They are not massive rifles. In fact pretty much the lightest rifles out there (saving for the inevitable 22 LR)
This is a massive rifle -
That looks like a boyes anti-tank rifle.
It is, indeed. Quite good if your are hunting small panzers or railway locomotives.
One of the things I see a few of scattered about around here - and most people probably never notice - are the concrete bases of WW2 spigot mortars. There's a skeletal one - with the concrete knocked out of it - outside the fire station in the village of Potton that looks weirdly sculptural.
Very sad. I'm afraid it was going to happen at some point. The Channel does appear to be less challenging than the Med, where the fatality rate was around 2 people per 100 attempting the crossing, despite the shipping lane and perhaps because of the shorter distance.
It is sad.
What is worse, is that it has happened a few times this year already.
As a humanitarian concern we need to stop these crossings. Its just not safe to cross the Channel in a dinghy. The Channel is one of the most dangerous and choppy straights on the planet, with a lot of shipping volume etc too.
I'm sorry Robert, the virus isn't sentient. [snip]
The virus isn't sentient, but people get complacent, which is why it looks as though it's punishing hubris.
Which is fine, but I don't think the UK is being complacent, the scale and breadth of the third dose/booster programme is very good evidence of the opposite. I'd suggest that it was European countries from July to now that have been extremely complacent, they almost uniformly assumed that if they went into winter with a few thousand cases per day and NPIs it would protect them from the kind of take off in infections they've seen over the last two weeks. The UK approach of building natural immunity and taking the unvaccinated exit wave in the summer/autumn was simply dismissed as a "dangerous experiment" by far, far too many scientists and officials across the continent. There was, and still is, a lot of sound reasoning and science behind that decision to fully unlockdown in July, it was a calculated risk that we wouldn't have this under control by Xmas so lets move to endemicity from day 0 of being fully reopen.
Once again, and I know you aren't defending the European approach here, I'd like to ask the question - NPIs simply displace infections into the future, what's the use of having them when the available PIs aren't going to change very much in said future? There was never a scenario of having a miracle pill that makes everyone immune to COVID forever being developed from July to now, so why delay?
Yes, I agree with that. All the same, the way in which unlocking was done has led to thousands of avoidable deaths. The blunder included abandoning mask mandates on public transport, very mixed messaging, inadequate efforts to get the younger cohorts jabbed (we were complacent on that one), unnecessary delay to getting youngsters jabbed before schools and colleges re-opened, and a total screw-up on the NHS app and Covid passes, which could have been used to re-open slightly earlier, with fewer deaths.
But Richard, that doesn't follow. The reason we're in a relatively strong position is because of those things you think we did wrong. Allowing the virus to spread while vaccine immunity levels were high among older vaccinated people has built up natural immunity among the won't vaccinate cohort. The only place I'd agree would be vaccination for 12-17 year olds, which IMO, was stupidly delayed by wanky liberal scientists who wanted to give our vaccine doses away.
Once again, by December 18th the UK will have had ~11m infections of which the vast majority are among the won't vaccinate cohort. You can't achieve that by putting up the NPIs you suggest, how does a 26 year old believer in "natural immunity" get infected if they can't get into the nightclub?
As Chris Whitty said, displacing potential hospitalisations from the summer to the winter isn't a good idea. He was right and the rest of Europe should have listened to him rather than assumed crazy Brexit Britain was doing everything wrong.
No, because it's massively preferable to get protection from the vaccine than from getting Covid. We lost momentum on the vaccinations of the younger cohorts, which is why our total proportion of double-jabbed is low compared with the best. Those who didn't want to get jabbed should have got the Macron treatment, for their own sakes and for those they come into contact with. If it had been done properly, with Covid passes used not as some kind of punishing imposition but as the route to freedom, we'd have had fewer deaths and hospitalisations for the same end result on population immunity.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Yes, but we made the conscious CHOICE to open up early, knowing that this would cause deaths and disease throughout the summer, but we did this because we felt it was better than continuously suppressing the virus, only to have a hideous spike in autumn, forcing us into lockdown again
See Chris Whitty's comments in early summer. He explicitly said this was the government's plan. So far, it seems like a bloody good plan. That wasn't "luck"
...and Sir Keir vehemently opposed it #johnsonvariant
"In his strongest condemnation yet of the decision to press ahead with a full reopening on Monday, Starmer said Labour did not back the move, calling it “a reckless free-for-all”.
Blaming Boris Johnson’s “character” for the confusion, Starmer said: “Labour does not support the government’s plan. Lifting all restrictions at once is reckless – and doing so when the Johnson variant is already out of control risks a summer of chaos.
“We will always support jobs and livelihoods but Johnson’s recklessness risks plunging us back into restrictions again. The government has once again lost control of this virus and lost public trust in their messaging. They need to think again on their reckless plan, before it is too late."
I think there's a fair argument that Starmer and Labour backed the government over Covid measures on a few occasions when opposition might have been better (with or without hindsight), and opposed them at times when the government have been proved correct.
It's not a very good look.
Yes, so far this parliament, the three big achievements from the govt are Getting Brexit Done , when Sir Keir would have had us in the midst of another referendum, independently rolling out the vaccine, when Sir Keir wanted us tied to the EU, and unlocking in July, when Sir Keir wanted restrictions. These are things Boris can shout about in the next campaign, whilst Labour will waffle about unfair technicalities
Very sad. I'm afraid it was going to happen at some point. The Channel does appear to be less challenging than the Med, where the fatality rate was around 2 people per 100 attempting the crossing, despite the shipping lane and perhaps because of the shorter distance.
It is sad.
What is worse, is that it has happened a few times this year already.
As a humanitarian concern we need to stop these crossings. Its just not safe to cross the Channel in a dinghy. The Channel is one of the most dangerous and choppy straights on the planet, with a lot of shipping volume etc too.
Yes Philip I agree with you.
What we know about the migrants crossing the channel?
Gangs are exploiting them. On news at ten someone had given them a big boat and they carried it onto the beach and launched it completely full up. The French don’t seem to be doing much to stop that? Stop them setting off they would be safer then. Don’t the French police have helicopters, cameras drones, patrol vessels, any intel on the gangs exploiting these people?
Maybe local French people just want the immigrants gone, the `French politicians quietly work to do this so do the police?
Many of the asylum seekers themselves may be genuine. Heart set, maybe rightly or naively set on UK to make new home. A lot seem to be Kurds? Didn’t the US and UK too say to Kurds after IS fight, no the lands you have always lived on belong to Turkey and Iraq, continuing a rich history of West selling out the Kurds?
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
We've done OK historically, but are currently looking pretty good, because we've managed (so far) to remove restrictions without suffering a massive wave.
I can't help be concerned, though.
I am in London right now, and the temperature is dropping and *everyone* (including most of the members of this board) appear extremely unconcerned.
Now, there are lots of good reasons to be optimistic - we've eliminated children (mostly) as a transmission vector, we're ahead of the curve on boosters, and we allowed a lot of people to get the disease over the summer.
But lots of EU countries have had reason to be optimistic too: they have more restrictions, they gave their vaccines more recently, and the preponderance of data is that Pfizer offers greater protection. And yet they're increasingly being hammered too.
I suspect that we will see soaring cases in the next few weeks. The only question is whether those soaring cases result in hospitalisations or not. I hope that they will not, but am far from convinced.
The most plausible reason for this was posted today - from the analysis in the FT.
Numbers of elderly people in various parts of Europe didn't get the vaccine. Because of the vastly higher probabilities of server illness and death among the old, this creates a vulnerability.
I got some stick on here, for pointing out, during the early days of the vaccination campaign, that even if you got to 90% double vaxed, that leaves a lot of vulnerable people. If you plug in CFR numbers (which I did) - you get a serious medical problem.....
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
I'm sorry Robert, the virus isn't sentient. [snip]
The virus isn't sentient, but people get complacent, which is why it looks as though it's punishing hubris.
Which is fine, but I don't think the UK is being complacent, the scale and breadth of the third dose/booster programme is very good evidence of the opposite. I'd suggest that it was European countries from July to now that have been extremely complacent, they almost uniformly assumed that if they went into winter with a few thousand cases per day and NPIs it would protect them from the kind of take off in infections they've seen over the last two weeks. The UK approach of building natural immunity and taking the unvaccinated exit wave in the summer/autumn was simply dismissed as a "dangerous experiment" by far, far too many scientists and officials across the continent. There was, and still is, a lot of sound reasoning and science behind that decision to fully unlockdown in July, it was a calculated risk that we wouldn't have this under control by Xmas so lets move to endemicity from day 0 of being fully reopen.
Once again, and I know you aren't defending the European approach here, I'd like to ask the question - NPIs simply displace infections into the future, what's the use of having them when the available PIs aren't going to change very much in said future? There was never a scenario of having a miracle pill that makes everyone immune to COVID forever being developed from July to now, so why delay?
It's a little misleading to say that NPIs simply displace infections into the future.
Imagine a disease with an R of 2 in a population with 32 people.
It will go 1, 2, 3.8, 7.4, 14.2, 23-ish. Almost everyone gets it.
On the other hand if you impose NPIs such that R is 1, then it will go:
You can then remove NPIs, and because R is 2 and half of people have previously been infected, you won't get sustained outbreaks. In other words the NPIs allow you to settle at the level of herd immunity without blasting through it.
Except that's not what's happened. Those countries with NPIs post-summer unlockdown have managed to control infections to a degree that it's meant unvaccinated people have got no reservoir of natural immunity as they have here.
In the theoretical model you're right, but the real world data is that the UK has had virtually no mandatory NPIs since the middle of July and the R value has hovered between 0.7 and 1.5 until now, it's probably already sitting at about 1 again after hitting the heady heights of 1.1 in the last couple of weeks. The degree of NPIs across Europe acted to displace infections into the future and, sadly for a lot of people, that future has arrived. I'm actually really upset at the lack of medium term thinking among the governments of Europe, they seemed to only think about tomorrow's headline rate of COVID infections rather than what the situation would be like in the winter with waning immunity, transmission advantages for respiratory viruses that come with cold weather and generally higher use of healthcare in the winter.
As I've said, Europe seemed to almost revel in calling the UK a plague island and our strategy "backfiring" despite it working almost exactly as intended, to build up a wall of natural immunity in the summer and autumn among those people who we knew wouldn't get vaccinated. I take no pleasure from watching their NPI strategy backfire, it's frustrating that supposedly smart people across the continent have been blinded by the politics of Brexit and simply dismissed what UK government scientists were saying about displacing infections to winter being a bad idea and probably a net negative for deaths/hospitalisations. Now ordinary people in Europe will pay for that. Worse still it doesn't feel like any European nation will learn this lesson and they will doggedly cling to their NPIs in March/April when it comes time for them to unlockdown.
Very sad. I'm afraid it was going to happen at some point. The Channel does appear to be less challenging than the Med, where the fatality rate was around 2 people per 100 attempting the crossing, despite the shipping lane and perhaps because of the shorter distance.
It is sad.
What is worse, is that it has happened a few times this year already.
As a humanitarian concern we need to stop these crossings. Its just not safe to cross the Channel in a dinghy. The Channel is one of the most dangerous and choppy straights on the planet, with a lot of shipping volume etc too.
Yes Philip I agree with you.
What we know about the migrants crossing the channel?
Gangs are exploiting them. On news at ten someone had given them a big boat and they carried it onto the beach and launched it completely full up. The French don’t seem to be doing much to stop that? Stop them setting off they would be safer then. Don’t the French police have helicopters, cameras drones, patrol vessels, any intel on the gangs exploiting these people?
Maybe local French people just want the immigrants gone, the `French politicians quietly work to do this so do the police?
Many of the asylum seekers themselves may be genuine. Heart set, maybe rightly or naively set on UK to make new home. A lot seem to be Kurds? Didn’t the US and UK too say to Kurds after IS fight, no the lands you have always lived on belong to Turkey and Iraq, containing a rich history of West selling out the Kurds?
The French police aren't especially quiet about this. In fact, given the stories of racism in the area, they will probably be all in favour of the refugees trying to cross in small boats as winter comes on.
Week on week case rise today seems to more or less the same size as last week's data issue that shifted cases to Thursday- so grounds for optimism that tomorrow will show a fall, albeit artificial, and then by Friday who knows, but hopeful signs in the specimen date data of things flattening off (i.e. Monday cases don't look on course to beat the 49k from last week).
Who could have predicted? Master Rittenhouse's stated intention of living a quiet life away from the limelight going well.
What did the left expect, when they tried to make someone defending himself into a racist figure of hate?
The only way America comes back together, is if people start loving each other again, and stop trying to make everything hyper-partisan, black or white (often literally) issue.
‘Hey mom, I’m off on a road trip to defend myself. Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick up an AR-15 on the way.’
Trump endorsing an armed vigilante shows what a dark place America is heading into.
I have not followed this case in much detail. However, it is clear that there were protests going on in 2020 in America where people were turning up with guns and attacking private property, in violation of all sorts of laws. The left were, and remain, supportive of these protests; and the current president is implicitly supporting these protests with his recent statements. Whilst the attempted coup by Trump supporters was disgraceful, the democrats are really just as bad; but as we know, educated people have an entrenched bias towards the "progressive" left which means that they don't see the problem correctly.
Ah yes, if there are sins on both sides that MUST mean all sins are equal, of course.
Another phenomenon is that people look at the 'coup' and conclude that the republican party are now beyond the pale - in to Nazi territory. But this coup came in the wake of other parts of the government bowing down to a mob and suspending essential state functions. As the incumbent, Biden appears to guard the integrity of the system; but also continues to make pretty astounding statements about the finding of juries.
Biden? The same Biden who said “I stand by what the jury has concluded.” and “The jury system works. We have to abide by it.”
The kid is legally innocent of his proven vigilante murders. Pointing out that this is bonkers isn't seeking to undermine a jury system which preserves at its heart the jury's absolute right to acquit if it sees fit for any reason it likes and that you are innocent until proven guilty even if you are in fact guilty.
Its imperfect but nobody is calling for its replacement with a "people's court" type mob trial of the kind wanted by the insurrectionists seeking out Vice President Pence that day.
From what I have heard I don't think it is murder but manslaughter of some kind would seem correct. It is at least as bad as causing death by drunk driving imo.
My personal view is that there should be a serious crime of 'taking weapons to a riot'. That would apply to rioters, and to vigilantes.
Obviously, if it's your own home, you wouldn't be guilty (as you wouldn't have taken weapons to a riot).
But if you cross state lines to go to a riot and to carry an AR15 assault rifle then (as with driving a vehicle when impaired) you are dramatically increasing the chance that someone dies.
In a civilized society, the government has the monopoly on the use of force. Here, the police seem to have tacitly chosen to back militias to take on protestors. That's never going to end well.
But that effectively nullifies the Second Amendment; you just define pretty much everything as a riot.
why do you hate Freedom, boy?
Just declare 2022 the year of The Purge and have done with it. If you don't want to participate feel free to depart before New Year's Eve. From midnight in Times Square its free reign until the survivors found Gilead.
A question - what do you see, when you see this?
Guns.
Yes. But how are they holding the guns, or how are the guns holstered? What is their body language? What is their overall demeanour? What other kit are they wearing and how? Where are they and what is around them? What implications do the answers to all of the above have for the actual situation and their intent/role?
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
I can conclude that it's not something I'm likely to see (or want to see) on a British street.
It is not something I have ever seen on a US street in person, but I have witnessed in person at LHR.
The question was what do you see from the picture. Not what is the story you can research on the internet. From the picture, it is not possible to assume they are not authorized to be in that position simply because they are not wearing a uniform that you recognize as such.
As I said, from the picture it is not possible to make additional assumptions about context etc... From other research, yes.
Personally, I am very much against open carriage of such weapons by anyone, including the police in the pursuit of their normal duties (although I can see that they are needed by the police in specific emergencies and crises)
Yay! Rival groups of vigilantes walking the streets with massive rifles to supposedly protect people. Definitely safer than what we have over here.
They are not massive rifles. In fact pretty much the lightest rifles out there (saving for the inevitable 22 LR)
This is a massive rifle -
Pffft.
Still in use during the Ukrainian unpleasantness I read.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
That's great, congratulations!
I used to play a lot online and in my local pub, partly because my training in statistics is useful and partly just for fun (and in the case of the pub games socialising with people with a different background to my usual circle) - like you I reckon that paying up to $20 for an interesting evening is worthwhile and if you win that's a bonus. I now play less as I'm too busy with other stuff and I do lose on average over time, but still enjoy it now and then.
A key point is i think that the games have a huge variance, and even a really good player can have a run of 30 tournaments in which they get knocked out every time. The usual structure is that you cash if you're in the top 10%, but only make a significant profit in the top 2% or so. So you need both a willingness to accept 30 losses of whatever stake you play at without feeling demoralised, and the phlegmatic attitude that keeps you playing carefully and avoiding the oh-sod-it gambles that tempt people who've lost too often.
And sometimes one's just been lucky and one isn't really that good. My Labour agent in 1997 retired as an agent after he won £100,000 in a national tournament - ha, he thought, this beats the hell out of inputting canvass sheets, I'll be a full-time player. Two years later, he had never won another tournament, and gave up.
Great advice Nick I'm sure Philip will appreciate it.
Bigger news is that you (at least at some point) were a regular pub goer.
I genuinely had the impression that pubs were a foreign country for you.
I'm sorry Robert, the virus isn't sentient. [snip]
The virus isn't sentient, but people get complacent, which is why it looks as though it's punishing hubris.
Which is fine, but I don't think the UK is being complacent, the scale and breadth of the third dose/booster programme is very good evidence of the opposite. I'd suggest that it was European countries from July to now that have been extremely complacent, they almost uniformly assumed that if they went into winter with a few thousand cases per day and NPIs it would protect them from the kind of take off in infections they've seen over the last two weeks. The UK approach of building natural immunity and taking the unvaccinated exit wave in the summer/autumn was simply dismissed as a "dangerous experiment" by far, far too many scientists and officials across the continent. There was, and still is, a lot of sound reasoning and science behind that decision to fully unlockdown in July, it was a calculated risk that we wouldn't have this under control by Xmas so lets move to endemicity from day 0 of being fully reopen.
Once again, and I know you aren't defending the European approach here, I'd like to ask the question - NPIs simply displace infections into the future, what's the use of having them when the available PIs aren't going to change very much in said future? There was never a scenario of having a miracle pill that makes everyone immune to COVID forever being developed from July to now, so why delay?
It's a little misleading to say that NPIs simply displace infections into the future.
Imagine a disease with an R of 2 in a population with 32 people.
It will go 1, 2, 3.8, 7.4, 14.2, 23-ish. Almost everyone gets it.
On the other hand if you impose NPIs such that R is 1, then it will go:
You can then remove NPIs, and because R is 2 and half of people have previously been infected, you won't get sustained outbreaks. In other words the NPIs allow you to settle at the level of herd immunity without blasting through it.
Except that's not what's happened. Those countries with NPIs post-summer unlockdown have managed to control infections to a degree that it's meant unvaccinated people have got no reservoir of natural immunity as they have here.
In the theoretical model you're right, but the real world data is that the UK has had virtually no mandatory NPIs since the middle of July and the R value has hovered between 0.7 and 1.5 until now, it's probably already sitting at about 1 again after hitting the heady heights of 1.1 in the last couple of weeks. The degree of NPIs across Europe acted to displace infections into the future and, sadly for a lot of people, that future has arrived. I'm actually really upset at the lack of medium term thinking among the governments of Europe, they seemed to only think about tomorrow's headline rate of COVID infections rather than what the situation would be like in the winter with waning immunity, transmission advantages for respiratory viruses that come with cold weather and generally higher use of healthcare in the winter.
As I've said, Europe seemed to almost revel in calling the UK a plague island and our strategy "backfiring" despite it working almost exactly as intended, to build up a wall of natural immunity in the summer and autumn among those people who we knew wouldn't get vaccinated. I take no pleasure from watching their NPI strategy backfire, it's frustrating that supposedly smart people across the continent have been blinded by the politics of Brexit and simply dismissed what UK government scientists were saying about displacing infections to winter being a bad idea and probably a net negative for deaths/hospitalisations. Now ordinary people in Europe will pay for that. Worse still it doesn't feel like any European nation will learn this lesson and they will doggedly cling to their NPIs in March/April when it comes time for them to unlockdown.
Oh, I agree with you that given the complexities of waning immunity, booster shots, and large unvaccinated cohorts, there is a massive amount of variability, and hence the dramatic increases in rates in much of Europe.
But from a straight mathematical perspective, NPIs suppress R temporarily and mean that you will settle at a lower number of people infected than would otherwise be the case. That remains so.
Interesting chart from the John Burn-Murdoch thread:
Despite UK having lower vax coverage than e.g Belgium & France, the difference in share of people previously infected is larger (UK 30%, FRA 15%), meaning that going into this winter, the UK had fewer people still exposed to the virus, less scope for a wave of hospitalisations.
Yes, those 9m infections since the end of May have made a huge difference to our overall picture. Having a summer/autumn exit wave is why we're very much on the endemic side of this
Needless Suffering
Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.
Paywalled sadly. Is the article as hyperbolic and hysterical as the headline?
It is depressingly poor and incurious. American journalism is in a right old state. British hacks used to admire the American press for its numerous fact-checkers and prickly adherence to the truth, even if it was stodgy and stiff compared to British journalism
What a precipitous decline we have seen. This denial of the facts started with the right, I suspect- shock jocks and Fox News - but it has now infested the left as badly if not worse, via Wokery and Trump, and it is now everywhere. This is just one example. The NYT doesn't like Brexit Britain, so anything it does must be bad, including its handling of Covid. The agenda is prioritised over the truth, there isn't really any attempt to seek the truth.
It means Americans are now shockingly misinformed across the political spectrum at probably the worst time for that to happen
Even as a polemic that article is palpably unconvinced by its own invective.
It concludes with this: "Still, it is worth putting Britain’s troubles in perspective. The country’s high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. “This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives,” Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. “We’ve definitely left the worst behind us.”
Anyone who toiled the bottom of the piece would wonder whether the subeditor had done likewise.
It's more that they really tried very hard to push the whole "plague island" agenda along with the rest of the global liberal left who see the UK as some kind of outcast that left heaven. Now it seems as though all of our decisions in 2021 have been correct, the vaccine programme, the reopening schedule, the full reopening and dumping almost all of the NPIs, allowing for kids to be infected in September/October and the booster shot timing/availability. These decisions were all basically the right course of action. In the world of the liberal left anything the UK does is wrong and you can still sense this attitude now with loads of European countries ratcheting up their NPIs without admitting that, yes, maybe the UK got it right and they got it wrong on reopening and "running hot" in the summer/autumn.
Very few voices in Europe (and liberal America) are doing their retrospective and coming to the correct conclusion that they were wrong to keep hold of NPIs in the summer and reduce the spread. As I said last week, it almost feels as thought they will repeat this exercise in March/April when it's time to reduce NPIs, they simply don't seem to have it within them to admit we did it right and will hold onto idiotic vaccine passports, masks, social distancing and keep late night socialising closed.
You know we vote differently, but there's probably some truth in that, to be fair.
I generally agree with Max but I fear he is perhaps being a little hubristic, and as the 2nd Covid Law of Hubris says that any country that boasts of its Covid handling then gets horribly walloped, this makes me quite nervous
Of course, I also hope he is right.
He is certainly correct that there is psychological resistance in some liberal anti-Brexit circles to the idea the UK might get anything right, especially so if it gets something uniquely right. That is like heresy. It's like Trump being right about lab leak - which he was, but because he was Trump it literally became impossible to repeat the theory on social media and for a year we were forbidden from discussing an obviously plausible scenario. In supposedly free countries. Astounding
Fundamentally, what we have got "right" in this country is being really crap at preventing the spread of Covid. We did really well in the early days of vaccination but everyone else in Europe caught up some time ago. We are doing well in terms of boosters but not uniquely so. If we do better this winter it will be because we have been having something like 40-50K recorded cases of Covid a day throughout the entire summer and certainly since we removed the NPIs. We have millions more people who are protected by having had it already. Countries that have done "better" are getting hammered now.
Thing is, being ahead on vaccinations in the early days saved lives, particularly as the most vulnerable were vaccinated first. It's great that many places have caught up now, but being slower to get to a similar level of vaccination meant that more people died.
I don't dispute that but our slightly underdeclared policy of letting the virus rip meant that we had well above an average number of cases which also generated more deaths. Hopefully, we are now going into the reward part of that equation but our deaths per million figure is currently above all European countries except Italy, Poland, Latvia and Moldova. That will not be the case by the Spring.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
We've done OK historically, but are currently looking pretty good, because we've managed (so far) to remove restrictions without suffering a massive wave.
I can't help be concerned, though.
I am in London right now, and the temperature is dropping and *everyone* (including most of the members of this board) appear extremely unconcerned.
Now, there are lots of good reasons to be optimistic - we've eliminated children (mostly) as a transmission vector, we're ahead of the curve on boosters, and we allowed a lot of people to get the disease over the summer.
But lots of EU countries have had reason to be optimistic too: they have more restrictions, they gave their vaccines more recently, and the preponderance of data is that Pfizer offers greater protection. And yet they're increasingly being hammered too.
I suspect that we will see soaring cases in the next few weeks. The only question is whether those soaring cases result in hospitalisations or not. I hope that they will not, but am far from convinced.
The most plausible reason for this was posted today - from the analysis in the FT.
Numbers of elderly people in various parts of Europe didn't get the vaccine. Because of the vastly higher probabilities of server illness and death among the old, this creates a vulnerability.
I got some stick on here, for pointing out, during the early days of the vaccination campaign, that even if you got to 90% double vaxed, that leaves a lot of vulnerable people. If you plug in CFR numbers (which I did) - you get a serious medical problem.....
Those are great charts.
That FT thread is an absolute tour de force.
That John Burn-Murdoch chap is an absolute star. And there are a great many European leaders who should be looking at those charts and learning.
I'm sorry Robert, the virus isn't sentient. [snip]
The virus isn't sentient, but people get complacent, which is why it looks as though it's punishing hubris.
Which is fine, but I don't think the UK is being complacent, the scale and breadth of the third dose/booster programme is very good evidence of the opposite. I'd suggest that it was European countries from July to now that have been extremely complacent, they almost uniformly assumed that if they went into winter with a few thousand cases per day and NPIs it would protect them from the kind of take off in infections they've seen over the last two weeks. The UK approach of building natural immunity and taking the unvaccinated exit wave in the summer/autumn was simply dismissed as a "dangerous experiment" by far, far too many scientists and officials across the continent. There was, and still is, a lot of sound reasoning and science behind that decision to fully unlockdown in July, it was a calculated risk that we wouldn't have this under control by Xmas so lets move to endemicity from day 0 of being fully reopen.
Once again, and I know you aren't defending the European approach here, I'd like to ask the question - NPIs simply displace infections into the future, what's the use of having them when the available PIs aren't going to change very much in said future? There was never a scenario of having a miracle pill that makes everyone immune to COVID forever being developed from July to now, so why delay?
Yes, I agree with that. All the same, the way in which unlocking was done has led to thousands of avoidable deaths. The blunder included abandoning mask mandates on public transport, very mixed messaging, inadequate efforts to get the younger cohorts jabbed (we were complacent on that one), unnecessary delay to getting youngsters jabbed before schools and colleges re-opened, and a total screw-up on the NHS app and Covid passes, which could have been used to re-open slightly earlier, with fewer deaths.
But Richard, that doesn't follow. The reason we're in a relatively strong position is because of those things you think we did wrong. Allowing the virus to spread while vaccine immunity levels were high among older vaccinated people has built up natural immunity among the won't vaccinate cohort. The only place I'd agree would be vaccination for 12-17 year olds, which IMO, was stupidly delayed by wanky liberal scientists who wanted to give our vaccine doses away.
Once again, by December 18th the UK will have had ~11m infections of which the vast majority are among the won't vaccinate cohort. You can't achieve that by putting up the NPIs you suggest, how does a 26 year old believer in "natural immunity" get infected if they can't get into the nightclub?
As Chris Whitty said, displacing potential hospitalisations from the summer to the winter isn't a good idea. He was right and the rest of Europe should have listened to him rather than assumed crazy Brexit Britain was doing everything wrong.
No, because it's massively preferable to get protection from the vaccine than from getting Covid. We lost momentum on the vaccinations of the younger cohorts, which is why our total proportion of double-jabbed is low compared with the best. Those who didn't want to get jabbed should have got the Macron treatment, for their own sakes and for those they come into contact with. If it had been done properly, with Covid passes used not as some kind of punishing imposition but as the route to freedom, we'd have had fewer deaths and hospitalisations for the same end result on population immunity.
You're completely missing the wood for the trees. Even in France they've hit what? 75% of the population with two doses? We're at ~68%. There are simply far, far too many people who will decide the vaccine isn't for them, I think only Portugal has got double vax rates high enough to avoid a severe enough exit wave to cause a lockdown, they're at 88%. The chances of the UK getting to 88% double vaxxed are literally zero, we don't even give 12-15 year olds two doses yet!
Again, your strategy would have had us entering the winter with maybe 75% double jabbed rather than 68% but it would also have meant 8-9m fewer infections from July to December. How would the 25% get any immunity heading into the winter months? We'd be facing the same bloody situation as most of Europe, surging infection rates and not enough hospital capacity to handle it.
I'm sorry Robert, the virus isn't sentient. [snip]
The virus isn't sentient, but people get complacent, which is why it looks as though it's punishing hubris.
Which is fine, but I don't think the UK is being complacent, the scale and breadth of the third dose/booster programme is very good evidence of the opposite. I'd suggest that it was European countries from July to now that have been extremely complacent, they almost uniformly assumed that if they went into winter with a few thousand cases per day and NPIs it would protect them from the kind of take off in infections they've seen over the last two weeks. The UK approach of building natural immunity and taking the unvaccinated exit wave in the summer/autumn was simply dismissed as a "dangerous experiment" by far, far too many scientists and officials across the continent. There was, and still is, a lot of sound reasoning and science behind that decision to fully unlockdown in July, it was a calculated risk that we wouldn't have this under control by Xmas so lets move to endemicity from day 0 of being fully reopen.
Once again, and I know you aren't defending the European approach here, I'd like to ask the question - NPIs simply displace infections into the future, what's the use of having them when the available PIs aren't going to change very much in said future? There was never a scenario of having a miracle pill that makes everyone immune to COVID forever being developed from July to now, so why delay?
Yes, I agree with that. All the same, the way in which unlocking was done has led to thousands of avoidable deaths, on top of the tens of thousands of the winter wave last year. The blunders included abandoning mask mandates on public transport, very mixed messaging, inadequate efforts to get the younger cohorts jabbed (we were complacent on that one), unnecessary delay to getting youngsters jabbed before schools and colleges re-opened, and a total screw-up on the NHS app and Covid passes, which could have been used to re-open slightly earlier, with fewer deaths.
"unlocking...has led to thousands of avoidable deaths"
Is problematic for me. Akin to smoking - are you really saying that people will have put themselves into a vulnerable situation unknowingly. People knew that there has been a continued risk and decided to go out. Much as mountaineers know there is a risk and decide to climb mountains.
So what about vulnerable people living with the unjabbed ie children. Good point. They themselves will have been jabbed and I'm not sure that is "thousands".
And there are mask mandates on public transport. They are to a large degree ignored (although as per my observation today and yesterday, more in the evening than the morning - go figure).
This outdoes anything I’ve seen for hypocrisy. Incredible!!
“ An angry Shaun Murphy claimed that amateur players should not be allowed to compete in professional tournaments after he suffered a shock first-round defeat in the UK Championship against the Chinese teenager Si Jiahui.
Murphy’s rant, in which he complained that it is “not fair” to face an opponent without the pressure of competing for their “livelihoods”, came two years after the 39-year-old attempted to qualify for golf’s Open Championship as an amateur.
This is our livelihood. This is our living. We are self-employed individuals and not contracted sportsmen. We don’t play for a team. The other 127 runners and riders in the tournament, it is their livelihood too. It is wrong, in my opinion, to walk into somebody who is not playing with the same pressures and concerns I am.
Murphy, who plays golf from a scratch handicap, told Golf Monthly of his attempt to qualify for the 2019 Open Championship: “I think the one thing I do have going for me is that I already have a full-time job. Golf isn’t my livelihood.”
Relative to the other players I will be playing against, it doesn’t really matter to me if I win or lose. I won’t be under the pressure they are under. Most of them are trying to win the Open Championship. I am just trying to have a good day out.”
Comments
(Nerd factoid alert: when it was built in the 1990s, it was supposed to be the first composite stretch of main road in the UK: a concrete subbase with tarmac wearing surface. For some reason they abandoned the idea and made it concrete.)
What is it for?
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
The UK is very much middle of the pack on deaths.
The one on the right has tripwire connected to the bulge of semtex in his trousers? No one is getting close enough to cut off his Johnson
HUDs that do basic figures are allowed on some sites. The one bit of external software I've downloaded is a free-to-use HUD that simply shows the opposing players VPIP (% of hands they voluntary paid to go into a hand), PFR (% of time they raised pre-flop) and how many hands knowledge you have of them. I know other players will be using much more professional HUDs but I don't want to pay for one.
The one time that came in useful was I raised with AQ pre-flop and an opposing player pushed all in. I could see they'd only played 5% of hands at that time. Someone else called, I folded. They had AA. Someone only playing 5% of hands is only playing with the very best hands so avoid them. If someone's playing 50% of hands then they're a fish you can get value from.
Edit: and to permit that, the house has to be handed over to the children.
What I read is well-groomed, relaxed people who are extremely well kitted out with communication kit incorporated into their clothing in a manner that indicates a level of professional training. I see the two people who know how to handle their weapons.
I cannot based on that simple photograph make any assumptions as to what is going on and the context of the photo.
https://www.solarinnova.net/en/products/photovoltaic/mounting/pvnb
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/t-magazine/hayao-miyazaki-studio-ghibli.html
Fine long read article.
Nothings going to stop us this year! Says the governments ad campaign. Or is it Tesco’s?
I can't help be concerned, though.
I am in London right now, and the temperature is dropping and *everyone* (including most of the members of this board) appear extremely unconcerned.
Now, there are lots of good reasons to be optimistic - we've eliminated children (mostly) as a transmission vector, we're ahead of the curve on boosters, and we allowed a lot of people to get the disease over the summer.
But lots of EU countries have had reason to be optimistic too: they have more restrictions, they gave their vaccines more recently, and the preponderance of data is that Pfizer offers greater protection. And yet they're increasingly being hammered too.
I suspect that we will see soaring cases in the next few weeks. The only question is whether those soaring cases result in hospitalisations or not. I hope that they will not, but am far from convinced.
https://www.state.gov/participant-list-the-summit-for-democracy/
110 nations in total.
Taiwan is on the list, good!
Turkey is not, Controversial!
Kuwait is not which does surprise me.
any other surprises?
I've got a few minutes until my next bloody meeting so I'll waste that time laying out my reasoning.
1. By the 18th of December (a week before Xmas) ~25m people will have had their third vaccine dose, that takes around 23m people completely out of circulation as potential viral hosts.
2. In addition a further 22m people have had two doses of vaccine, most of them Pfizer/Moderna given the age cohorts not eligible for boosters, that takes another 13m people out of circulation as potential viral hosts (probably more, but lets be conservative).
3. Since the reopening in July around 11m people will have been infected with COVID by the 18th of December, we know that a constant of 80% of infections are in people without any antibodies, I think this has been shown not just here, but in the US as well. That makes around 8-9m people who were in the zero immunity cohort now have a very high degree of immunity (~85% efficacy against any kind of reinfection, potentially higher for people who have recovered from Delta). That's ~7m people who are simply out of the viral funnel.
Adding those up we have somewhere around 42-44m people in the UK who will be basically immune to COVID in the run up to Xmas and a further 9-11m who will make for substandard hosts because they have some level of immunity from either a single dose of vaccine or two doses that have waned sufficiently to allow for a low grade infection. The potential for a runaway epidemic in the UK is now very low, and the key difference here vs Europe is that 11m people who got it/will get it from July to Xmas.
And now it's half three!
Nor Hungary. With Turkey, suggests a democracy has to vote in a certain way. Which has been ever thus.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/21/armed-father-daughter-duo-seek-to-protect-anti-rittenhouse-protesters/
Dr Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies programme, said the UK has “led the world” on how to approach measurement of pandemics.
He told the WHO media briefing (see also 15:07): “The UK has really led the world in how to look at data, how to do excellent analytics, how to give context and get insights for disease control”.
He said that governments need to move away from “blunt percentages” to “individuals” that have been missed in terms of targeting who needs to be vaccinated.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2021/nov/24/covid-news-live-south-korea-reports-record-daily-cases-us-to-require-vaccination-proof-at-all-border-crossings?page=with:block-619e57788f08434e45dd06b4#block-619e57788f08434e45dd06b4
And from Deepti....
Yup, the equivalent of the top of the range camera that catches every angle of a car crash with amazing precision, and detail. But does nothing to avert it.
https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1463532978261344263?s=20
Numbers of elderly people in various parts of Europe didn't get the vaccine. Because of the vastly higher probabilities of server illness and death among the old, this creates a vulnerability.
I got some stick on here, for pointing out, during the early days of the vaccination campaign, that even if you got to 90% double vaxed, that leaves a lot of vulnerable people. If you plug in CFR numbers (which I did) - you get a serious medical problem.....
90% and 95% aren't "about the same" - its 10% unvaccinated vs 5% - i.e. twice as bad...
As I said, from the picture it is not possible to make additional assumptions about context etc... From other research, yes.
Personally, I am very much against open carriage of such weapons by anyone, including the police in the pursuit of their normal duties (although I can see that they are needed by the police in specific emergencies and crises)
When you consider that the UK did get ahead on the vaccinations, it's quite remarkable how badly we have done in terms of deaths.
Say you have 800K in a particular UK year group.
90% is 180K people unprotected
95% is 90K unprotected
For one year of age....
I used to play a lot online and in my local pub, partly because my training in statistics is useful and partly just for fun (and in the case of the pub games socialising with people with a different background to my usual circle) - like you I reckon that paying up to $20 for an interesting evening is worthwhile and if you win that's a bonus. I now play less as I'm too busy with other stuff and I do lose on average over time, but still enjoy it now and then.
A key point is i think that the games have a huge variance, and even a really good player can have a run of 30 tournaments in which they get knocked out every time. The usual structure is that you cash if you're in the top 10%, but only make a significant profit in the top 2% or so. So you need both a willingness to accept 30 losses of whatever stake you play at without feeling demoralised, and the phlegmatic attitude that keeps you playing carefully and avoiding the oh-sod-it gambles that tempt people who've lost too often.
And sometimes one's just been lucky and one isn't really that good. My Labour agent in 1997 retired as an agent after he won £100,000 in a national tournament - ha, he thought, this beats the hell out of inputting canvass sheets, I'll be a full-time player. Two years later, he had never won another tournament, and gave up.
Once again, and I know you aren't defending the European approach here, I'd like to ask the question - NPIs simply displace infections into the future, what's the use of having them when the available PIs aren't going to change very much in said future? There was never a scenario of having a miracle pill that makes everyone immune to COVID forever being developed from July to now, so why delay?
This is a massive rifle -
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59406355
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
With that said, there's clearly an upper limit to it. 99.9% and 99.99% are a difference of 10x from that perspective, but both would be highly unlikely to see sustained outbreaks.
And Europe is relatively good at recording covid deaths, bits of Asia, Africa, and South America are worse still with many countries seeing excess deaths several times larger than attributed to covid.
The current excess death estimate is now at 17.4 million.
It’s hardly halcyon weather on channel this time of year. And here am I sat in warm in town this afternoon drinking wine. Is it lucky I am born a tyke not a Kurd? Is there anything we can do about it?
(I was actually born in Wales by accident).
The problem trying to actually make any money from playing as opposed to just doing it for fun is the site takes quite a high rake. 9% of the entrance fee is rake so instantly just to be breaking even, without counting for variance, you need an ~10% edge just to get past the rake.
Winning your own share of the pot on average still leaves you down. On the other hand when I was playing it was clear some people were not sensible players and had more money than sense, pushing in with duff hands then rebuying a new ticket during the rebuy period as soon as they were eliminated. In general I'm not keen on the idea of rebuys, when I've played in the past when you're out, you're out, but on the other hand if these people buying multiple tickets because they've got more money than sense are inflating the pot then that counters the rake so there's that at least.
"In his strongest condemnation yet of the decision to press ahead with a full reopening on Monday, Starmer said Labour did not back the move, calling it “a reckless free-for-all”.
Blaming Boris Johnson’s “character” for the confusion, Starmer said: “Labour does not support the government’s plan. Lifting all restrictions at once is reckless – and doing so when the Johnson variant is already out of control risks a summer of chaos.
“We will always support jobs and livelihoods but Johnson’s recklessness risks plunging us back into restrictions again. The government has once again lost control of this virus and lost public trust in their messaging. They need to think again on their reckless plan, before it is too late."
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/19/keir-starmer-condemns-reckless-decision-to-lift-covid-restrictions
Imagine a disease with an R of 2 in a population with 32 people.
It will go 1, 2, 3.8, 7.4, 14.2, 23-ish. Almost everyone gets it.
On the other hand if you impose NPIs such that R is 1, then it will go:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
You can then remove NPIs, and because R is 2 and half of people have previously been infected, you won't get sustained outbreaks. In other words the NPIs allow you to settle at the level of herd immunity without blasting through it.
Once again, by December 18th the UK will have had ~11m infections of which the vast majority are among the won't vaccinate cohort. You can't achieve that by putting up the NPIs you suggest, how does a 26 year old believer in "natural immunity" get infected if they can't get into the nightclub?
As Chris Whitty said, displacing potential hospitalisations from the summer to the winter isn't a good idea. He was right and the rest of Europe should have listened to him rather than assumed crazy Brexit Britain was doing everything wrong.
http://www.pillbox-study-group.org.uk/other-wwii-defensive-structures/spigot-mortar/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacker_Bombard
The avoidable deaths were those last winter, when Johnson messed up trying to save Christmas even though we knew the vaccine cavalry was coming.
Word is that 14 no confidence letters have gone in - a 'turning point' says one MP
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/11/24/brexit-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak-pmqs-keir-starmer-migrants/
It's not a very good look.
https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/25/probability/probability-aa-vs-kk-vs-qq-pf-1434780/
8 players on the table (his example, 9 in most of mine). Each player is dealt two cards.
What are the odds one player gets a pair of aces and another a pair of kings? What are the odds that three players each hold a pair: ace, king and queen respectively.
Which caused Admiral Ernest King (a massive Anglophobe) to declare "There’ll always be an England in the United States Navy."
What is worse, is that it has happened a few times this year already.
As a humanitarian concern we need to stop these crossings. Its just not safe to cross the Channel in a dinghy. The Channel is one of the most dangerous and choppy straights on the planet, with a lot of shipping volume etc too.
What we know about the migrants crossing the channel?
Gangs are exploiting them. On news at ten someone had given them a big boat and they carried it onto the beach and launched it completely full up. The French don’t seem to be doing much to stop that? Stop them setting off they would be safer then. Don’t the French police have helicopters, cameras drones, patrol vessels, any intel on the gangs exploiting these people?
Maybe local French people just want the immigrants gone, the `French politicians quietly work to do this so do the police?
Many of the asylum seekers themselves may be genuine. Heart set, maybe rightly or naively set on UK to make new home. A lot seem to be Kurds? Didn’t the US and UK too say to Kurds after IS fight, no the lands you have always lived on belong to Turkey and Iraq, continuing a rich history of West selling out the Kurds?
In the theoretical model you're right, but the real world data is that the UK has had virtually no mandatory NPIs since the middle of July and the R value has hovered between 0.7 and 1.5 until now, it's probably already sitting at about 1 again after hitting the heady heights of 1.1 in the last couple of weeks. The degree of NPIs across Europe acted to displace infections into the future and, sadly for a lot of people, that future has arrived. I'm actually really upset at the lack of medium term thinking among the governments of Europe, they seemed to only think about tomorrow's headline rate of COVID infections rather than what the situation would be like in the winter with waning immunity, transmission advantages for respiratory viruses that come with cold weather and generally higher use of healthcare in the winter.
As I've said, Europe seemed to almost revel in calling the UK a plague island and our strategy "backfiring" despite it working almost exactly as intended, to build up a wall of natural immunity in the summer and autumn among those people who we knew wouldn't get vaccinated. I take no pleasure from watching their NPI strategy backfire, it's frustrating that supposedly smart people across the continent have been blinded by the politics of Brexit and simply dismissed what UK government scientists were saying about displacing infections to winter being a bad idea and probably a net negative for deaths/hospitalisations. Now ordinary people in Europe will pay for that. Worse still it doesn't feel like any European nation will learn this lesson and they will doggedly cling to their NPIs in March/April when it comes time for them to unlockdown.
Still in use during the Ukrainian unpleasantness I read.
https://twitter.com/sima_kotecha/status/1463543831694131211
Bigger news is that you (at least at some point) were a regular pub goer.
I genuinely had the impression that pubs were a foreign country for you.
But from a straight mathematical perspective, NPIs suppress R temporarily and mean that you will settle at a lower number of people infected than would otherwise be the case. That remains so.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10238113/New-Botswana-variant-32-horrific-mutations-evolved-Covid-strain-EVER.html?ito=social-twitter_mailonline
Again, your strategy would have had us entering the winter with maybe 75% double jabbed rather than 68% but it would also have meant 8-9m fewer infections from July to December. How would the 25% get any immunity heading into the winter months? We'd be facing the same bloody situation as most of Europe, surging infection rates and not enough hospital capacity to handle it.
Is problematic for me. Akin to smoking - are you really saying that people will have put themselves into a vulnerable situation unknowingly. People knew that there has been a continued risk and decided to go out. Much as mountaineers know there is a risk and decide to climb mountains.
So what about vulnerable people living with the unjabbed ie children. Good point. They themselves will have been jabbed and I'm not sure that is "thousands".
And there are mask mandates on public transport. They are to a large degree ignored (although as per my observation today and yesterday, more in the evening than the morning - go figure).
“ An angry Shaun Murphy claimed that amateur players should not be allowed to compete in professional tournaments after he suffered a shock first-round defeat in the UK Championship against the Chinese teenager Si Jiahui.
Murphy’s rant, in which he complained that it is “not fair” to face an opponent without the pressure of competing for their “livelihoods”, came two years after the 39-year-old attempted to qualify for golf’s Open Championship as an amateur.
This is our livelihood. This is our living. We are self-employed individuals and not contracted sportsmen. We don’t play for a team. The other 127 runners and riders in the tournament, it is their livelihood too. It is wrong, in my opinion, to walk into somebody who is not playing with the same pressures and concerns I am.
Murphy, who plays golf from a scratch handicap, told Golf Monthly of his attempt to qualify for the 2019 Open Championship: “I think the one thing I do have going for me is that I already have a full-time job. Golf isn’t my livelihood.”
Relative to the other players I will be playing against, it doesn’t really matter to me if I win or lose. I won’t be under the pressure they are under. Most of them are trying to win the Open Championship. I am just trying to have a good day out.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/shaun-murphy-amateur-si-jiahui-should-not-be-allowed-to-compete-in-uk-championship-xjcgd99nw