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.
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.
Yes, almost exactly that. I guess there's the edge case where a fourth player has another pair of aces or kings or queens, etc, and I wouldn't want those excluded from the calculation. And it could well have been 9 players, I just remember there being more than 6, and 8 seemed like a good number.
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.”
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.
I actually don't think that holds with Delta unless the NPIs become permanent, which is definitely a major worry of mine for most of Europe. The R value of Delta is so high that any relaxation will cause an exit wave that eventually infects everyone without immunity through prior infection of three doses of vaccine. That was the key change in thinking within SAGE that led to our unlockdown decision in July, that everyone in the country would now get COVID regardless of anything we tried to suppress it so lets take the exit wave in the summer rather than have a guaranteed one in the winter.
I know that Peppa and his cabinet are so used to their lies they believe them to be true. But they aren't. The Secretary of State for Culture is conducting a culture war against broadcasters who don't broadcast what she thinks they should.
I know that Peppa and his cabinet are so used to their lies they believe them to be true. But they aren't. The Secretary of State for Culture is conducting a culture war against broadcasters who don't broadcast what she thinks they should.
We pay interest on debt which could be repaid with the proceeds of selling a non strategic asset the state has no business owning, but granted that's a side point.
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.”
For those not in the know the chess world champs starts Friday. For those of us who did sort of know but thought it started today there's two day of media shittery till the clocks start.
No betting for me but.... Nepomniachtchi is definitely a wild card. Not the hardest worker of the tippity top but one of those players full of talent. And particularly (IMO) a player who will have benefited from the rigour of the extended preparation. As this world championships has been delayed for a year.
Plus never good to discount the Russian federation.
"Countries should consider mandatory Covid vaccination, says WHO Europe
Countries should consider implementing mandatory Covid vaccination, the director of World Health Organization (WHO) Europe said today.
Robb Butler said that although “mandatory vaccine can, but does not always, increase uptake”, he suggested countries should start thinking about the issue.
It comes after Germany’s tourism commissioner, Thomas Bareiss, said he expected vaccination to become mandatory in the country. Austria plans to make it compulsory from February."
(Guardian Live blog)
If this happens, anti-vaxxers will riot, and it will be much worse than anything hitherto. So many of them REALLY believe. I foresee violence, and deaths. Tragically
Question: How can you force someone to have a vaccination? At the very worst, you could throw them in jail (which would be farcical) – we are not going to have stormtroopers with needles entering people's homes!
Yes, a good question. I can't see any nation (apart from China) marching into kitchens and pinning people to the fridge, with a needle in the copper's hand
However you could do it pretty effectively by making entry to ANYWHERE dependant on a vaxport. Even essential shops, all schools, all parks, every single public space, and so on. How many people would be able to avoid doing any of these things? Very few
That said, it is seems a drastic and extremely dangerous policy. There will be violent resistance, likesay
Indeed it is complete madness and would require a surveillance state on a whole new level to impose it via 'vaxgates' as you describe.
You could instead levy a 'vaccination tax' on all taxpayers. A 'vaccination tax relief' that was equal to the initial tax would be conferred on those citizens who proved vax status to HMRC within, say, 60 days. But that's not quite the same as actually mandating vaccination.
Making the unvaccinated pay if they get Covid and need to go to hospital seems like a better plan. Not nice, pretty brutal, no one wants to do it, but it has an essential fairness. It should be tailored to income, of course
You took the risk and endangered others, why should the vaxxed pay AGAIN for your idiocy?
Or shame? Pictues of unvaxxed people everywhere? Be wary of this person or that?
These are all severe and unpleasant measures, but still not as bad or dangerous as mandatory jabs
Going via the tax system through income tax is relatively straightforward and would be a progressive levy on refuseniks. If some form of penalty is to be imposed, it should be financial – nothing more.
I proposed an NI surcharge waived with a vaccine certificate the other day.
- hospitalisations still falling - deaths still falling - cases down among the older groups, especially those with boosters (In England at least) - cases up among unvaccinated children (In England at least) and the some of the other young age groups.
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.
I actually don't think that holds with Delta unless the NPIs become permanent, which is definitely a major worry of mine for most of Europe. The R value of Delta is so high that any relaxation will cause an exit wave that eventually infects everyone without immunity through prior infection of three doses of vaccine. That was the key change in thinking within SAGE that led to our unlockdown decision in July, that everyone in the country would now get COVID regardless of anything we tried to suppress it so lets take the exit wave in the summer rather than have a guaranteed one in the winter.
I'm sorry Max, but the maths is the maths whether R0 is 9 or 1.9. Now, I grant you that the benefits of NPIs to get you a softer curve to herd immunity are smaller when the R is greater, but nevertheless if you artificially lower R to get to the mathematical limit, you will avoid blowing through it.
The question is whether the costs of that are worth the benefit.
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.
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
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.
Lol - well, yes, usually you're right. But I'll go anywhere - a prison, a tomb, a mountainside - for a good game of something.
I even have a half of cider while playing. Wild, eh?
The game is a great leveller - my group (about 75% male) had several carpenters, a lawyer, a doctor, a hairdresser, a couple of students, a couple of Albanian building workers. We all got on easily, carried forward by mutual pleasure in the game.
Various moments where the "Do I respond to that dodgy joke?" arose, though - easier to object to sexist jokes online than in a convivial setting, especially if the woman next to you is laughing heartily. Lots of teasing about Labour too, but all at a very harmless level. I like to think I can judge when something is meant to be offensive rather than really just friendly banter - but I appreciate that the threshold varies.
I know that Peppa and his cabinet are so used to their lies they believe them to be true. But they aren't. The Secretary of State for Culture is conducting a culture war against broadcasters who don't broadcast what she thinks they should.
We pay interest on debt which could be repaid with the proceeds of selling a non strategic asset the state has no business owning, but granted that's a side point.
Channel 4 makes a profit. Its is a productive asset. At what current rate does the state borrow at?
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.
I actually don't think that holds with Delta unless the NPIs become permanent, which is definitely a major worry of mine for most of Europe. The R value of Delta is so high that any relaxation will cause an exit wave that eventually infects everyone without immunity through prior infection of three doses of vaccine. That was the key change in thinking within SAGE that led to our unlockdown decision in July, that everyone in the country would now get COVID regardless of anything we tried to suppress it so lets take the exit wave in the summer rather than have a guaranteed one in the winter.
I'm sorry Max, but the maths is the maths whether R0 is 9 or 1.9. Now, I grant you that the benefits of NPIs to get you a softer curve to herd immunity are smaller when the R is greater, but nevertheless if you artificially lower R to get to the mathematical limit, you will avoid blowing through it.
The question is whether the costs of that are worth the benefit.
Does that analysis not depend on (effectively) zero covid after reaching herd immunity though?
You will overshoot the required immunity during the current wave with a higher R, yes, but even if you don't will there not in practice always be external seeding, and thus continuing exposure in the long term anyway?
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
There's another side to this as well: the traffickers who are making millions out of this human tragedy, and who allegedly oversell the benefits and undersell the risks and costs.
I'd love to see UN action on people trafficking - and it has to be international action.
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.
I actually don't think that holds with Delta unless the NPIs become permanent, which is definitely a major worry of mine for most of Europe. The R value of Delta is so high that any relaxation will cause an exit wave that eventually infects everyone without immunity through prior infection of three doses of vaccine. That was the key change in thinking within SAGE that led to our unlockdown decision in July, that everyone in the country would now get COVID regardless of anything we tried to suppress it so lets take the exit wave in the summer rather than have a guaranteed one in the winter.
I'm sorry Max, but the maths is the maths whether R0 is 9 or 1.9. Now, I grant you that the benefits of NPIs to get you a softer curve to herd immunity are smaller when the R is greater, but nevertheless if you artificially lower R to get to the mathematical limit, you will avoid blowing through it.
The question is whether the costs of that are worth the benefit.
Again, I don't doubt the maths, but I think the reality is that:
waning immunity + won't vaccinate = large number of potential hosts
And that is unavoidable, so in the spherical cow scenario of 32 people and an R of 2, sure that might make sense. In a population with shit loads of variables and clear evidence that NPIs are now no more than a delaying tactic, I think it's fair to say they are no more than a delaying tactic. Barring a magic pill which grants 100% lifetime immunity to COVID, basically all of us are going to get it, the extent to which we do will depend on whether we got vaccinated or not beforehand.
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.
Lol - well, yes, usually you're right. But I'll go anywhere - a prison, a tomb, a mountainside - for a good game of something.
I even have a half of cider while playing. Wild, eh?
The game is a great leveller - my group (about 75% male) had several carpenters, a lawyer, a doctor, a hairdresser, a couple of students, a couple of Albanian building workers. We all got on easily, carried forward by mutual pleasure in the game.
Various moments where the "Do I respond to that dodgy joke?" arose, though - easier to object to sexist jokes online than in a convivial setting, especially if the woman next to you is laughing heartily. Lots of teasing about Labour too, but all at a very harmless level. I like to think I can judge when something is meant to be offensive rather than really just friendly banter - but I appreciate that the threshold varies.
Yes it is a moment I'm sure we've all had when someone in the group says something that has crossed the line (not saying it happened at all in your gang) and one's heart sinks in a "that changes everything" kind of way.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
My latest by-election film - from Old Bexley and Sidcup for @mailplus. And watch Richard Tice’s priceless response to the suggestion by his Reform UK colleague Nigel Farage, that he may return to front-line politics: https://twitter.com/mailplus/status/1463482757884088326
I know that Peppa and his cabinet are so used to their lies they believe them to be true. But they aren't. The Secretary of State for Culture is conducting a culture war against broadcasters who don't broadcast what she thinks they should.
We pay interest on debt which could be repaid with the proceeds of selling a non strategic asset the state has no business owning, but granted that's a side point.
Channel 4 makes a profit. Its is a productive asset. At what current rate does the state borrow at?
Hopefully it's a productive asset with a better rate of return than the rail projects just binned. Anyhow, point was just the idea it's not impacting on public finances is wrong - if it wants full freedom from a daft culture secretary, it should go private and please itself.
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
It's worked extremely well in France, overcoming vaccine resistance very effectively.
As for swapping places, well their cumulative deaths per million are substantially lower than ours, although of course most of that is accounted for by the Boris disaster of last winter. Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Refugee: "I NEED to get to the nearest safe country PDQ!" Not a refugee: "I WANT to get the UK by any means!"
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.
Yes, almost exactly that. I guess there's the edge case where a fourth player has another pair of aces or kings or queens, etc, and I wouldn't want those excluded from the calculation. And it could well have been 9 players, I just remember there being more than 6, and 8 seemed like a good number.
I had a spreadsheet that did these sort of sums in online poker’s early days, although of course nowadays there are websites that will do such sums for free.
One thing to remember at a large table is that the odds of any of the players having a particular rare combination are much lower than those of any specified player having it. It’s a variant of the well known ‘same birthday’ statistics, that you only need about 25 people to have a 50:50 chance that two of them have the same birthday.
With the additional factor in poker that every player who doesn’t have AA slightly increases the chances that the next one along might have it.
The chance that any of the players who see the flop has at least one ace is very high, because having the ace self-selects the sample, in that they are (often wrongly) not often folded. It’s what the players you are up against at the flop might have that matters, not what those who chucked their cards in might have had. The chance of 72 offsuit being in your flop are almost negligible, only rising with the alcohol blood percentage of the players.
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
Up to a point, Lord Copper - its not just how many have been jabbed but how old they are:
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.
Yes, time is a factor too. I'll sometimes have a free evening for poker and then rather than just play one $16 game (about my preferred limit for an evening) and perhaps get eliminated in 20 minutes, I'll play a $2.20 rebuy and rebuy several times if I'm knocked out. I realise I'm falling behind with each rebuy, but it gives me the evening's experience at the same cost.
I did have one holiday including a few days in Las Vegas, where the rake is really shocking after being used to Pokerstars' 10% - typically seemed to be 25-30%. Good fun all the same, but strictly for laughs if you're not really good. I had one cash game with a seriously drunk opponent - I had JJ, and very uncharacteristically went all in with £200 when J52 appeared. He called with 10 7, and the dealer played out 9 8, giving him the straight. "Haha," he slurred. "You are such a, such a... crap player, man." Grrr!
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.
It's not binary. Yes, opening up was the correct decision (in fact I argued for a slightly earlier re-opening). That doesn't mean that the execution of that decision was optimal.
Crossing the channel in a dinghy has an effective mortality rate of about 0.1%
Time to stop living in fear etc etc and let people have the freedom to etc etc
If you are trying to be funny, it’s not really very funny today though isn’t it.
Maybe I should stop commenting now I am tipsy before I say something very out of place. I was banned from a site a few weeks ago for calling someone a poisonous rock fish, but despite looking rather funny they are very poisonous.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
I know that Peppa and his cabinet are so used to their lies they believe them to be true. But they aren't. The Secretary of State for Culture is conducting a culture war against broadcasters who don't broadcast what she thinks they should.
I think people get confused because it's publicly owned.
But the Culture Secretary really should know this.
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.
It's not binary. Yes, opening up was the correct decision (in fact I argued for a slightly earlier re-opening). That doesn't mean that the execution of that decision was optimal.
The FT thread makes the point that we won’t know until the end - we have suffered extra deaths through the summer, and it isnt yet clear what the cost of the winter deaths in Western Europe might be.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Completely off topic, but an attempt at taking advantage of the collective wisdom of PB. I'm meant to be going to Austria in the new year for a martial arts camp. Obviously their lockdown is meant to be over by then, but if you still believe "just a few weeks to flatten the curve" then you probably haven't been paying much attention!
Any suggestions for countries that are most likely to be open and worth visiting at that time (i.e. covid restrictions don't make the whole thing pointless, I had a friend who went to Singapore last week and it sounded dire unless you just wanted to sit by a hotel pool all day)?: If I lived abroad, England would be the obvious one, but I'm not keen on yet another domestic holiday.
I figure it'll be dependent on a combination of current vaccination/infection levels and political stance, so most of Europe is probably out. Canada also seems risky, so the only other place I can think of is the southern states of the USA. All ideas welcome!
Call me biased, but UAE is definitely open. The World Fair (Dubai Expo 2020) is in town and on until March, along with a lot of gigs and shows. Weather is good, 30C at the moment, and will cool a little over the winter months. Very few restrictions outside Abu Dhabi City, just masks in public places when not eating and drinking. No vaccine requirements, but you might need a test on arrival.
I know that Peppa and his cabinet are so used to their lies they believe them to be true. But they aren't. The Secretary of State for Culture is conducting a culture war against broadcasters who don't broadcast what she thinks they should.
I think people get confused because it's publicly owned.
But the Culture Secretary really should know this.
Not only that but it ran a £74m surplus last year!
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
It's worked extremely well in France, overcoming vaccine resistance very effectively.
As for swapping places, well their cumulative deaths per million are substantially lower than ours, although of course most of that is accounted for by the Boris disaster of last winter. Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
I think you're significantly overestimating their vaccination programme. It's been good at overcoming the inertia based won't vaccinate cohort but not at overcoming the "natural immunity is best" cohort, which is a big number. Additionally, their spread of vaccination is poorer than ours, they've done a bunch of vaccines for under 18s and under 30s, more than we have for sure, but that won't really change the picture for hospitalisations. In the crucial over 60s cohorts they are quite far below our vaccination rates and far, far below our triple jab rate.
Additionally, they haven't got the wall of natural immunity among big sections of the won't vaccinate cohort that we have.
As I said, you've completely missed why the UK strategy was preferable to what the French have done. I wouldn't trade our position for their one going into winter this year.
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?
Letting, to help meet care costs
That's not very coherent. We have had policies for the last N years to make it as awkward as possible, difficult, and heavily taxed, to rent out such a singleton property.
And we regularly have people on PB dancing a jig on the putative graves of such 'evil' LLs. And demanding how evil it is that tenants are forced to rent such properties, rather than be able to buy one where the prices
(The claim about LLs driving up prices is complete BS, but that never registers.)
We have also had endless incoherent shouting about how evil and selfish old people with assets are.
Why do these particular better off old people suddenly get a free pass from their moral responsibilities?
Leaving all of that aside, it will not make a very significant contribution to the average care bill.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
I know that Peppa and his cabinet are so used to their lies they believe them to be true. But they aren't. The Secretary of State for Culture is conducting a culture war against broadcasters who don't broadcast what she thinks they should.
We pay interest on debt which could be repaid with the proceeds of selling a non strategic asset the state has no business owning, but granted that's a side point.
Channel 4 makes a profit. Its is a productive asset. At what current rate does the state borrow at?
Hopefully it's a productive asset with a better rate of return than the rail projects just binned. Anyhow, point was just the idea it's not impacting on public finances is wrong - if it wants full freedom from a daft culture secretary, it should go private and please itself.
I'm sure its impact is beneficial for both the state and the wider entertainment sector. Although I don't think it would be free from Dorries either way. She seems determined to find fault with journalists on one half of the field.
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.
Yes, time is a factor too. I'll sometimes have a free evening for poker and then rather than just play one $16 game (about my preferred limit for an evening) and perhaps get eliminated in 20 minutes, I'll play a $2.20 rebuy and rebuy several times if I'm knocked out. I realise I'm falling behind with each rebuy, but it gives me the evening's experience at the same cost.
I did have one holiday including a few days in Las Vegas, where the rake is really shocking after being used to Pokerstars' 10% - typically seemed to be 25-30%. Good fun all the same, but strictly for laughs if you're not really good. I had one cash game with a seriously drunk opponent - I had JJ, and very uncharacteristically went all in with £200 when J52 appeared. He called with 10 7, and the dealer played out 9 8, giving him the straight. "Haha," he slurred. "You are such a, such a... crap player, man." Grrr!
Ouch! Such is life though, it was a good play most of the time. You had 96% equity, but there's not much you can do when fortune goes with the dud.
I've never played cash games (except for pennies for a few minutes) that scares me. A tournament your losses are fixed as soon as you enter but cash games, especially if you go chasing losses, are a different matter.
I get what you mean about rebuys if you're just enjoying an evening though, that's not a bad attitude. Again if you're viewing it as entertainment its all healthy, its when non-pros think "I'll make money from this" that alarm bells should ring.
As columnist on the Telegraph Boris was earning £275,000 a year, only about £100k more than he gets as PM now and without the rent and mortgage free town house in Westminster and mansion in Buckinghamshire (with chef and staff) and government provided chauffeur driven car and police escort and flights he gets as perks of his job as PM.
If he stayed PM through the next general election and won it and headed to 10 years as PM he would be in the Blair and Thatcher league and could command millions on the lecture circuit as they did.
So Boris will want to stay and Tory MPs won't remove him unless Labour gets a clear poll lead and an alternative Tory leader polls better against Starmer than he does
I'd be surprised if Sunak doesn't already poll better than Johnson does given the last couple of weeks.
Is Sunak any better ? He appears, for instance, to be largely to blame for the rail debacle (though I note the Treasury is briefing that's it's all a problem of No10 'presentation').
It’s definitely not all plain sailing this week for Sunak:
FPT:
The Chancellor is getting it this week, for having let the Free Ports initiative get watered down by the Treasury civil servants, despite having authored a report on their advantage five years ago.
“The idea of reviving freeports had come from then-international trade secretary Liz Truss. She invited me and others to join a working group to push it forward. When I got there, I was pleased to see Rishi Sunak, who had recently published a think tank report extolling the virtues of freeports. I was less pleased to see ranks of Treasury civil servants, almost outnumbering those of us round the table. “They insisted on being here,” a trade official told me. This was now a joint Trade-Treasury project.
“I had the sinking feeling that — despite the support of the Prime Minister, the Trade Secretary, and the man who would become Chancellor — the freeports revival was already in its last throes. And so it proved. Oxbridge professors on the panel said freeports would only relocate jobs from one part of the UK to another. (Oxbridge economics says very little about entrepreneurship. It regards firms as a "given" rather than asking how and why new ones are generated. Hence the idea that jobs can only be moved around, not created.)
“The Treasury officials, meanwhile, complained of the complexity of changing the customs and VAT rules, hinting of fraud and tax avoidance. The number of freeports would be limited to 10 and politics, not economics, would decide where they were located. And they would have to focus on "high-tech" jobs (the politicians’ mantra) rather than what the market might produce. None of the people I suggested, who actually created or ran successful freeports around the world, were ever contacted. After one meeting, the freeports "working group" quietly expired.
“Recently there have been reports that ministers and businesses have said that Treasury is killing freeports with a lack of ambition on tax cuts and planning relaxation. This comes as the first freeport started operating in Teesside on Friday.”
Were circumstances ever bizarre enough that I was put in charge, I would shut down the Treasury at once. And I would create a new department from the ground up with entirely new people.
Nope, I would relocate all of it to somewhere well outside London (Darlington) and get them to understand how the rest of the UK works.
But the reality is that the treasury needs separate guidance in what they are planning to do, which for levelling up means - you need to fix things so that GDP per capita is increasing higher up North than in London. And if you don't no further promotions.
The problem about not believing in wealth creation is a long running thing.
When American style venture capitalism* tried to set up here, the Treasury tried to stop it. Because investment should be done by banks, apparently.
*The key to this is letting people risk their own money directly. In America there are some rather sensible rules regarding this.
I can't get into specifics but I'm tempted to lodge a complaint against Barclays for false advertising with their attitude toward business banking.
I had fun some years ago writing to the Times about Barclays advertising. They published my letter and later asked if I'd mind them giving my address out because several readers wanted to get in touch with me because they'd had a similar experience. The letter was accompanied by one of their cartoons which they called "The Language of loss"
Dear Sir
In October 2001 I invested £250,000 with Barclays personal investment Management. In February 2003 this had become £117,000 at which point I decided to cut my losses and withdrew my money. During this time Barclays bought and sold 80 shares and unit trusts. This frequency led my accountant to observe "They seem to buy, make a quick loss and then sell again fast".
Barclays is currently running an advertising campaign 'Fluent in Finance' featuring Samuel L. Jackson.
Is this regarded as fluency in the world of finance?
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.
It's not binary. Yes, opening up was the correct decision (in fact I argued for a slightly earlier re-opening). That doesn't mean that the execution of that decision was optimal.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
Crossing the channel in a dinghy has an effective mortality rate of about 0.1%
Time to stop living in fear etc etc and let people have the freedom to etc etc
If you are trying to be funny, it’s not really very funny today though isn’t it.
Maybe I should stop commenting now I am tipsy before I say something very out of place. I was banned from a site a few weeks ago for calling someone a poisonous rock fish, but despite looking rather funny they are very poisonous.
No, satire isn't always meant to be funny. In this case it's meant to reflect the irony of people saying we can live with Covid deaths whilst saying we can't live with migrants dying in the sea. If I was trying to be funny I would accuse them of racism against white people, but I'm not so I won't.
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.
Why would we want to swap our level of population immunity with France when ours is higher?
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
It's worked extremely well in France, overcoming vaccine resistance very effectively.
As for swapping places, well their cumulative deaths per million are substantially lower than ours, although of course most of that is accounted for by the Boris disaster of last winter. Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
Their cumulative deaths per million are at 1,812 to our 2,110 - they're lower, but substantial is being a bit generous. Germany is substantially less, the Czechs are substantially more. France is in the mid pack with most of the other large European countries, and from this point forwards I'm happy holding our cards.
Coersion worked well in France in young groups, but they have higher unvaccinated among vulnerable ages. In Scotland the rate of adult vaccination has been lower than in England since they brought in passports so the omens aren't great that it would have been a silver bullet anywhere on this island.
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.
In the early days of online poker there was easy money to be made, as there were tons of poor players who were easy pickings. Having started as one of them myself and lost about £500, I read a few books (the Harrington series are particularly good and would interest anyone who likes cards and statistics) and managed to turn it round and make about £2000. But the win rate tailed off as the fish, as they are affectionately known, drifted away and other players did what I had done and wised up. Plus the large majority of serious players have heads up tracking programs (like Pokertracker, which you can buy) running that monitor other players’ betting and play automatically and display a whole range of stats on the screen. Against that, and the rake, it became impossible to make any money. And after a while it becomes a repetitive and pretty boring activity.
Not really. People wanting zero illegal immigration is a perfectly legitimate standpoint. People wanting zero deaths from diseases are totally barmy.
Edit: I suppose demanding would be a better word than wanting.
Hmm
- The response to the migrants in boats has been to pick them out of the water and feed them indifferent pizza. - The response to people dying from COVID had been spending money on the scale of a major war on various measures. At the moment, the primary method is spending hundreds of millions on booster shots.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Refugee: "I NEED to get to the nearest safe country PDQ!" Not a refugee: "I WANT to get the UK by any means!"
Sure. But as we all know when the Tories say "refugees MUST claim asylum in the first safe country they reach" we know it is another lie told to weaponise forriners in the minds of their voters.
Would I stick my kids in a dinghy to cross the channel to the UK from France? Hell no. So the motivation for the small number who are doing so must be pretty strong considering the widespread dislike of migrants in this country and the appalling treatment they get once formally processed here compared to other countries that most of them go to.
I'm unbothered by the amount of immigration/asylum seeking this country faces, it has never impacted me as far as I know and I'd rather err on the side of being too lenient than too strict given the stakes, but I'm not sure that comparison really works. For one, things require different responses, and there are any number of things less deadly than Covid that we haven't (or I sincerely hope we haven't) just ignored as if they are not a problem.
Given our, presumably intentionally, poor ability to handle the level of migrants coming by sea, the risks they personally face in going that route, and the certainty of a big impact of delays/problems even if they succeed, versus variosu probabilities or risk associated with an endemic disease, I can't on the face of it see the usefulness of equating them even though I don't care about reducing migration.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
Wrong on both counts, I'd have said. If you pick your boat and your weather window it's verging on being safe as houses, and the reward in being a poor person in the UK vs a poor person in the third world is immeasurable.
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
It's worked extremely well in France, overcoming vaccine resistance very effectively.
As for swapping places, well their cumulative deaths per million are substantially lower than ours, although of course most of that is accounted for by the Boris disaster of last winter. Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
I think you're significantly overestimating their vaccination programme. It's been good at overcoming the inertia based won't vaccinate cohort but not at overcoming the "natural immunity is best" cohort, which is a big number. Additionally, their spread of vaccination is poorer than ours, they've done a bunch of vaccines for under 18s and under 30s, more than we have for sure, but that won't really change the picture for hospitalisations. In the crucial over 60s cohorts they are quite far below our vaccination rates and far, far below our triple jab rate.
Additionally, they haven't got the wall of natural immunity among big sections of the won't vaccinate cohort that we have.
As I said, you've completely missed why the UK strategy was preferable to what the French have done. I wouldn't trade our position for their one going into winter this year.
Precisely. If the choice is 3% of over 70s unvaccinated and 30% of under 30s . . . or 10% of both . . . then I'd choose the former every time.
Vaxxports on things like nightclubs aren't targeting the right people.
Quite frankly some people aren't going to get vaccinated and that's their free choice in a free society. Stupid choice, but their choice. Over the summer and autumn now the sooner they get their "natural immunity" from an infection the better.
Cramming it all into the winter when the viruses R is given a natural boost is a terrible, terrible idea.
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
It's worked extremely well in France, overcoming vaccine resistance very effectively.
As for swapping places, well their cumulative deaths per million are substantially lower than ours, although of course most of that is accounted for by the Boris disaster of last winter. Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
I think you're significantly overestimating their vaccination programme. It's been good at overcoming the inertia based won't vaccinate cohort but not at overcoming the "natural immunity is best" cohort, which is a big number. Additionally, their spread of vaccination is poorer than ours, they've done a bunch of vaccines for under 18s and under 30s, more than we have for sure, but that won't really change the picture for hospitalisations. In the crucial over 60s cohorts they are quite far below our vaccination rates and far, far below our triple jab rate.
Additionally, they haven't got the wall of natural immunity among big sections of the won't vaccinate cohort that we have.
As I said, you've completely missed why the UK strategy was preferable to what the French have done. I wouldn't trade our position for their one going into winter this year.
Yes, I agree that the age distribution of vaccination is better here in the UK - as I said earlier, it's one of the things we got right. Still, France is better than most on that measure, and Macron has done well to overcome vaccine resistance which a year ago was amongst the worst in Europe (although I did say at the time that I thought they'd fall in line eventually).
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.
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.
It's not binary. Yes, opening up was the correct decision (in fact I argued for a slightly earlier re-opening). That doesn't mean that the execution of that decision was optimal.
The FT thread makes the point that we won’t know until the end - we have suffered extra deaths through the summer, and it isnt yet clear what the cost of the winter deaths in Western Europe might be.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
ejaculators! I’m sure Eagles is waiting with a handy something that can mop up what you are saying there.
It’s probably all to do with which university you went to?
Holmes and Watson did a lot of ejaculations.
In each other if you believe the BBC reimagining of it.
Well, when you've got this sort of thing to work with..
‘So he sat as I dropped off to sleep, and so he sat when a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up, and I found the summer sun shining into the apartment. The pipe was still between his lips...’
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
No no. Where did I say this was engineered? This was an accident. I said that the various plans she had to repel them such as tow backs would swamp boats and cause some people to drown. Whats more the Home Office know that as they wanted to criminalise the RNLI volunteers who would be dragging them out of the water.
I know this is going to upset people, here goes anyway - we've achieved our level of population immunity pretty "cheaply" since the end of July. We've registered around 15k people dying, most of whom were unvaccinated and on the flip side 8-9m people now have natural immunity that wouldn't otherwise have any. It may be insensitive but this is exactly the calculation government scientists will have made at the end of June.
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.
You misunderstand me. Your position against open carry is clear. You asked "was what do you see from the picture" to which I said vigilantes. Which it turns out they are. I'm not saying you support them doing so.
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?
Letting, to help meet care costs
That's not very coherent. We have had policies for the last N years to make it as awkward as possible, difficult, and heavily taxed, to rent out such a singleton property.
And we regularly have people on PB dancing a jig on the putative graves of such 'evil' LLs. And demanding how evil it is that tenants are forced to rent such properties, rather than be able to buy one where the prices
(The claim about LLs driving up prices is complete BS, but that never registers.)
We have also had endless incoherent shouting about how evil and selfish old people with assets are.
Why do these particular better off old people suddenly get a free pass from their moral responsibilities?
Leaving all of that aside, it will not make a very significant contribution to the average care bill.
Also of course, larger family homes generally give a terrible yield (say half that of a well-chosen normal family let), which means that they may provide excellent deals for tenants.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
No no. Where did I say this was engineered? This was an accident. I said that the various plans she had to repel them such as tow backs would swamp boats and cause some people to drown. Whats more the Home Office know that as they wanted to criminalise the RNLI volunteers who would be dragging them out of the water.
You seem not to know very much about boats. We know a fair amount about how to tow boats without swamping them. Similarly "Dinghy" can mean a lot of things, and there's all sorts of scenarios where you could quite happily and safely send your children across the Channel in one.
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.
I actually don't think that holds with Delta unless the NPIs become permanent, which is definitely a major worry of mine for most of Europe. The R value of Delta is so high that any relaxation will cause an exit wave that eventually infects everyone without immunity through prior infection of three doses of vaccine. That was the key change in thinking within SAGE that led to our unlockdown decision in July, that everyone in the country would now get COVID regardless of anything we tried to suppress it so lets take the exit wave in the summer rather than have a guaranteed one in the winter.
I'm sorry Max, but the maths is the maths whether R0 is 9 or 1.9. Now, I grant you that the benefits of NPIs to get you a softer curve to herd immunity are smaller when the R is greater, but nevertheless if you artificially lower R to get to the mathematical limit, you will avoid blowing through it.
The question is whether the costs of that are worth the benefit.
Does that analysis not depend on (effectively) zero covid after reaching herd immunity though?
You will overshoot the required immunity during the current wave with a higher R, yes, but even if you don't will there not in practice always be external seeding, and thus continuing exposure in the long term anyway?
There'll always be external seeding, but so long as R is below 1, it'll run out pretty quickly. If R is 0.9, the majority of people who bring Covid into the UK won't infect a single person.
I know this is going to upset people, here goes anyway - we've achieved our level of population immunity pretty "cheaply" since the end of July. We've registered around 15k people dying, most of whom were unvaccinated and on the flip side 8-9m people now have natural immunity that wouldn't otherwise have any. It may be insensitive but this is exactly the calculation government scientists will have made at the end of June.
Its not that insensitive. People die, its a fact of life, and sticking your head in the sand pretending you can eliminate death just isn't being honest to people.
If people choose not to get the vaccine, then that's their choice and they can live with the consequences of their choice.
People want to virtue signal about the "sanctity" of life and how life is more valuable than everything else, but it just isn't true. Everyone's story has to end one day, living life well is more important - and celebrate the life that people did lead when they're gone.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
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.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
No no. Where did I say this was engineered? This was an accident. I said that the various plans she had to repel them such as tow backs would swamp boats and cause some people to drown. Whats more the Home Office know that as they wanted to criminalise the RNLI volunteers who would be dragging them out of the water.
You seem not to know very much about boats. We know a fair amount about how to tow boats without swamping them. Similarly "Dinghy" can mean a lot of things, and there's all sorts of scenarios where you could quite happily and safely send your children across the Channel in one.
I'm no sailor. But as quite a few of these boats get into difficulties on the crossing without intervention we can surmise that many more would get into difficulties. And they tried to bar the RNLI from rescuing them - so they knew more would get into difficulties.
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
It's worked extremely well in France, overcoming vaccine resistance very effectively.
As for swapping places, well their cumulative deaths per million are substantially lower than ours, although of course most of that is accounted for by the Boris disaster of last winter. Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
I think you're significantly overestimating their vaccination programme. It's been good at overcoming the inertia based won't vaccinate cohort but not at overcoming the "natural immunity is best" cohort, which is a big number. Additionally, their spread of vaccination is poorer than ours, they've done a bunch of vaccines for under 18s and under 30s, more than we have for sure, but that won't really change the picture for hospitalisations. In the crucial over 60s cohorts they are quite far below our vaccination rates and far, far below our triple jab rate.
Additionally, they haven't got the wall of natural immunity among big sections of the won't vaccinate cohort that we have.
As I said, you've completely missed why the UK strategy was preferable to what the French have done. I wouldn't trade our position for their one going into winter this year.
Yes, I agree that the age distribution of vaccination is better here in the UK - as I said earlier, it's one of the things we got right. Still, France is better than most on that measure, and Macron has done well to overcome vaccine resistance which a year ago was amongst the worst in Europe (although I did say at the time that I thought they'd fall in line eventually).
Sure, but vaccination isn't enough to get to the herd immunity threshold, at least not 68% or 75%. Portugal at 88% will get there assuming they do third doses for all 88%. That's the endgame for the virus and heading into the winter the UK is at the cusp of herd immunity, our infection rate is fairly stable and hospitalisations are falling as well as numbers in hospital. France is millions and millions of infections or new vaccines away from herd immunity. They've probably reached the limit of who will get jabbed at 75% which means there are a very large number of people who are completely virus vulnerable without any antibodies.
The reason the UK strategy of having no NPIs is correct is that our cohort of completely virus vulnerable people is now extremely low and our cohort of people with waning immunity is shrinking by ~2.5m per week. It was the right strategy in July and it leaves us one of just a handful of countries not heading into Xmas looking at lockdowns.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
A showjumper with a spinal defect is suing her mother’s doctor for millions of pounds in a landmark legal case, arguing that she should never have been born.
Evie Toombes, 20, was born with spina bifida and sometimes spends 24 hours a day connected to treatment tubes.
However, she has become a prominent showjumper who aims to compete in the paralympics.
In a unique “wrongful conception” damages claim, Toombes, of Skegness, Lincolnshire, is suing Dr Philip Mitchell over his alleged failure to advise that her mother take vital supplements before getting pregnant.
The athlete has claimed in court that had the doctor advised Caroline Toombes to take folic acid supplements to minimise the risk of spina bifida in her baby, she would have put off getting pregnant until she had done so.
As a result the Evie Toombes would never have been born.
Given current energy prices and the price cap, energy companies are going to lose an average of £400 between now and April and that depends on prices staying at current levels.
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.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
Comments
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.
And it could well have been 9 players, I just remember there being more than 6, and 8 seemed like a good number.
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
Nadine Dorries: Just because Channel 4 is in receipt of public money
Damien Green: Channel 4 is not in receipt of license fee money
Nadine Dorries: And..So..Though its..Yeah and..That..
https://twitter.com/ukiswitheu/status/1463456731757887488
I know that Peppa and his cabinet are so used to their lies they believe them to be true. But they aren't. The Secretary of State for Culture is conducting a culture war against broadcasters who don't broadcast what she thinks they should.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
No betting for me but.... Nepomniachtchi is definitely a wild card. Not the hardest worker of the tippity top but one of those players full of talent. And particularly (IMO) a player who will have benefited from the rigour of the extended preparation. As this world championships has been delayed for a year.
Plus never good to discount the Russian federation.
- hospitalisations still falling
- deaths still falling
- cases down among the older groups, especially those with boosters (In England at least)
- cases up among unvaccinated children (In England at least) and the some of the other young age groups.
The question is whether the costs of that are worth the benefit.
https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map?type=fiw&year=2021
https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores
I even have a half of cider while playing. Wild, eh?
The game is a great leveller - my group (about 75% male) had several carpenters, a lawyer, a doctor, a hairdresser, a couple of students, a couple of Albanian building workers. We all got on easily, carried forward by mutual pleasure in the game.
Various moments where the "Do I respond to that dodgy joke?" arose, though - easier to object to sexist jokes online than in a convivial setting, especially if the woman next to you is laughing heartily. Lots of teasing about Labour too, but all at a very harmless level. I like to think I can judge when something is meant to be offensive rather than really just friendly banter - but I appreciate that the threshold varies.
You will overshoot the required immunity during the current wave with a higher R, yes, but even if you don't will there not in practice always be external seeding, and thus continuing exposure in the long term anyway?
I'd love to see UN action on people trafficking - and it has to be international action.
waning immunity + won't vaccinate = large number of potential hosts
And that is unavoidable, so in the spherical cow scenario of 32 people and an R of 2, sure that might make sense. In a population with shit loads of variables and clear evidence that NPIs are now no more than a delaying tactic, I think it's fair to say they are no more than a delaying tactic. Barring a magic pill which grants 100% lifetime immunity to COVID, basically all of us are going to get it, the extent to which we do will depend on whether we got vaccinated or not beforehand.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/10/02/why-the-word-woman-is-tying-people-in-knots
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
As for swapping places, well their cumulative deaths per million are substantially lower than ours, although of course most of that is accounted for by the Boris disaster of last winter. Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
Time to stop living in fear etc etc and let people have the freedom to etc etc
Not a refugee: "I WANT to get the UK by any means!"
One thing to remember at a large table is that the odds of any of the players having a particular rare combination are much lower than those of any specified player having it. It’s a variant of the well known ‘same birthday’ statistics, that you only need about 25 people to have a 50:50 chance that two of them have the same birthday.
With the additional factor in poker that every player who doesn’t have AA slightly increases the chances that the next one along might have it.
The chance that any of the players who see the flop has at least one ace is very high, because having the ace self-selects the sample, in that they are (often wrongly) not often folded. It’s what the players you are up against at the flop might have that matters, not what those who chucked their cards in might have had. The chance of 72 offsuit being in your flop are almost negligible, only rising with the alcohol blood percentage of the players.
Last month, 2,669 migrants crossed the channel in boats. This, apparently, is a national crisis requiring draconian action.
Last month 4,214 people died from Covid. This, apparently, is 'living with Covid', and requires no new measures.
Surely something is wrong here?
https://twitter.com/ReicherStephen/status/1462416910826545157
I did have one holiday including a few days in Las Vegas, where the rake is really shocking after being used to Pokerstars' 10% - typically seemed to be 25-30%. Good fun all the same, but strictly for laughs if you're not really good. I had one cash game with a seriously drunk opponent - I had JJ, and very uncharacteristically went all in with £200 when J52 appeared. He called with 10 7, and the dealer played out 9 8, giving him the straight. "Haha," he slurred. "You are such a, such a... crap player, man." Grrr!
Maybe I should stop commenting now I am tipsy before I say something very out of place. I was banned from a site a few weeks ago for calling someone a poisonous rock fish, but despite looking rather funny they are very poisonous.
But the Culture Secretary really should know this.
It’s probably all to do with which university you went to?
Additionally, they haven't got the wall of natural immunity among big sections of the won't vaccinate cohort that we have.
As I said, you've completely missed why the UK strategy was preferable to what the French have done. I wouldn't trade our position for their one going into winter this year.
Slovenia: 43.0% of tests were positive
Croatia: 40.0%
Laos: 34.6%
Poland: 24.6%
Hungary: 23.1%
Liechtenstein: 18.6%
Slovakia: 17.6%
Germany: 17.3%
Norway: 16.8%
Mexico: 16.6%
WHO criterion for "pandemic under control" is positivity rate below 5%.
https://twitter.com/appel_cam/status/1463461125421473799?s=20
UK: 4.6%
Social media bots may appear human, but their similar personalities give them away
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-11-social-media-bots-human-similar.html
And we regularly have people on PB dancing a jig on the putative graves of such 'evil' LLs. And demanding how evil it is that tenants are forced to rent such properties, rather than be able to buy one where the prices
(The claim about LLs driving up prices is complete BS, but that never registers.)
We have also had endless incoherent shouting about how evil and selfish old people with assets are.
Why do these particular better off old people suddenly get a free pass from their moral responsibilities?
Leaving all of that aside, it will not make a very significant contribution to the average care bill.
Edit: I suppose demanding would be a better word than wanting.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-59306355
I've never played cash games (except for pennies for a few minutes) that scares me. A tournament your losses are fixed as soon as you enter but cash games, especially if you go chasing losses, are a different matter.
I get what you mean about rebuys if you're just enjoying an evening though, that's not a bad attitude. Again if you're viewing it as entertainment its all healthy, its when non-pros think "I'll make money from this" that alarm bells should ring.
Dear Sir
In October 2001 I invested £250,000 with Barclays personal investment Management. In February 2003 this had become £117,000 at which point I decided to cut my losses and withdrew my money. During this time Barclays bought and sold 80 shares and unit trusts. This frequency led my accountant to observe "They seem to buy, make a quick loss and then sell again fast".
Barclays is currently running an advertising campaign 'Fluent in Finance' featuring Samuel L. Jackson.
Is this regarded as fluency in the world of finance?
Yours Faithfully
Roger
If I was trying to be funny I would accuse them of racism against white people, but I'm not so I won't.
Coersion worked well in France in young groups, but they have higher unvaccinated among vulnerable ages. In Scotland the rate of adult vaccination has been lower than in England since they brought in passports so the omens aren't great that it would have been a silver bullet anywhere on this island.
- The response to the migrants in boats has been to pick them out of the water and feed them indifferent pizza.
- The response to people dying from COVID had been spending money on the scale of a major war on various measures. At the moment, the primary method is spending hundreds of millions on booster shots.
Would I stick my kids in a dinghy to cross the channel to the UK from France? Hell no. So the motivation for the small number who are doing so must be pretty strong considering the widespread dislike of migrants in this country and the appalling treatment they get once formally processed here compared to other countries that most of them go to.
Given our, presumably intentionally, poor ability to handle the level of migrants coming by sea, the risks they personally face in going that route, and the certainty of a big impact of delays/problems even if they succeed, versus variosu probabilities or risk associated with an endemic disease, I can't on the face of it see the usefulness of equating them even though I don't care about reducing migration.
Vaxxports on things like nightclubs aren't targeting the right people.
Quite frankly some people aren't going to get vaccinated and that's their free choice in a free society. Stupid choice, but their choice. Over the summer and autumn now the sooner they get their "natural immunity" from an infection the better.
Cramming it all into the winter when the viruses R is given a natural boost is a terrible, terrible idea.
Obviously you do these calculations by hard work, but I love that you can just simulate an answer now. Helps to insulate.
‘So he sat as I dropped off to sleep, and so he sat when a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up, and I found the summer sun shining into the apartment. The pipe was still between his lips...’
It's like watching a horrible and slow car crash.
If people choose not to get the vaccine, then that's their choice and they can live with the consequences of their choice.
People want to virtue signal about the "sanctity" of life and how life is more valuable than everything else, but it just isn't true. Everyone's story has to end one day, living life well is more important - and celebrate the life that people did lead when they're gone.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
The reason the UK strategy of having no NPIs is correct is that our cohort of completely virus vulnerable people is now extremely low and our cohort of people with waning immunity is shrinking by ~2.5m per week. It was the right strategy in July and it leaves us one of just a handful of countries not heading into Xmas looking at lockdowns.
Evie Toombes, 20, was born with spina bifida and sometimes spends 24 hours a day connected to treatment tubes.
However, she has become a prominent showjumper who aims to compete in the paralympics.
In a unique “wrongful conception” damages claim, Toombes, of Skegness, Lincolnshire, is suing Dr Philip Mitchell over his alleged failure to advise that her mother take vital supplements before getting pregnant.
The athlete has claimed in court that had the doctor advised Caroline Toombes to take folic acid supplements to minimise the risk of spina bifida in her baby, she would have put off getting pregnant until she had done so.
As a result the Evie Toombes would never have been born.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/spina-bifida-showjumper-evie-toombes-sues-mother-s-gp-over-her-birth-rl66gfmf6