What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
Can you talk us through the numbers, or give a link? The Uk population is about 70 million, of whom 70% are fully vaccinated. Assume that nobody who is fully vaccinated catches a case of Covid serious enough to be hospitalised. That leaves 24 million people who are not fully vaccinated yet. You say that if they were all exposed to the virus tomorrow, less than 0.2% would be hospitalised? That would be excellent news, but it doesn't sound right.
Sure, the number of people in the UK is ~67m of whom 46m 18+ are double vaxxed, in addition monitoring by Cambridge and Imperial shows that a further 13-17m kids and adults have immunity from prior infection. Then number of virus naive people in the UK is now thought to be between 5m and 8m people mostly in younger age categories.
Additionally, hospitalisation is not uniform among age groups in the UK vaccine uptake among the key 60+ age group is close to 100% so the potential for hospitalisations is low in an age group that is most at risk of being hospitalised. PHE regularly produces an antibody monitoring study for UK adults and in those key age groups antibody presence from vaccines is almost always above 95% of those sampled and overall antibody presence is close to 100% when antibodies produced by natural infection are rolled in.
Finally, the spread of virus naive people is primarily in the under 24 age category due to lower vaccination rates, the hospitalisation rate for these people is very low, as in if it's 1/10,000 being hospitalised that would be a surprise. For kids under 12 where there is no vaccination but high natural immunity there is almost zero hospitalisation, during the whole pandemic only a few hundred kids have needed hospital treatment and the survival rate is almost 100%.
The Delta exit wave has essentially filled in the immunity gaps that the UK had after our reasonable but not outstanding vaccine campaign.
Aiui the number will get smaller as more over 60s get their third doses.
Good summary.
One note: there is that troubling and possibly anecdotal evidence from SA of “toddlers” going into hospital with suspected Omicron
I have not seen it properly evidenced or verified, let alone scientifically investigated, but just a tiny reason for caution…
We have this with every variant, I remember the blue tick wankers saying that Boris was killing kids by getting rid of the bubbles for the school year this September because Delta was magically completely different from Alpha. Even last year with Alpha we had reports of kids being hospitalised at a higher rate but then it just turned out that no, hospitals had just started testing everyone so registered positive tests among kids that came in for other issues. We also had that Kawasaki disease scare right at the beginning which was, again, egged on by the same blue tick wankers looking to cause panic for likes.
I'm not ruling out the possibility, though my reasoning for being sceptical is sound. The doctor on Sunday explained that it was all to do with ACE-2 receptors, old people have loads, under 40s have not many and kids have barely any. It's extremely difficult for the virus to actually enter cells in key parts of the body for kids which is why they don't present severe symptoms.
Don't forget the 99% of survivors also get long covid...
Try to master the basics of detection bias before embarking on a comedy career...
Did I accidentally run over your toes with my shopping trolley or something? You seem very agitated at my every post.
Loving the analogy, plonkingly obvious logical fallacy = badly steered shopping trolley. There's almost a hint of self-insight here. Well done!
They say breakthrough infections in those previously infected are twice the rate as for Delta (bad)
But for the fully vaccinated the efficacy goes down just from 95 to 90% (good).
But isn’t that vaccine data equivalent to a doubling of breakthrough risk (10% vs 5%)?
Still pretty decent data to be honest, because both numbers suggest immune escape isn’t that great.
Yes whilst still being good a drop from 95% to 90% means that the risk has doubled. My immediate view is that it's not as bad as feared, but still bad enough to potentially cause some big problems in a population where vaccination is limited or waning. For the UK we really need to get cracking with the boosters, and look at what can be done to get the unvaccinated to change their minds.
If this SA/Israeli data verifies, the pressure on the unvaxxed will be intense. Likewise the pressure on governments to badger the unvaxxed into submission
Why should the rest of us tolerate lockdown and horror to save their sorry asses?
The PM was asked about the 5 m totally unvaxxed (journalist's figure) today. Answer came there none. If they start filling the hospitals again this will become untenable.
Vaccines aren't the only kind of immunity though, yes it makes sense to have more people in the funnel, though if we have 46m vaccinated people and then another 15m with natural immunity the pool of people to get infected is very low, and the pool of potential hospitalisations is extremely low. The London school of hygiene and tropical medicine have done a really great study on this for a handful of European countries including the UK. If the data from SA is correct then it doesn't massively change the outcomes of the model.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Because the possible presence of non human intelligence in our skies and seas is absolutely fascinating. Surely?
Almost as fascinating is the shrugging reaction from humans….
Statistically, of course other beings are out there. It's a massive universe.
But let's assume that there are videos that the military have taken, showing *things*. Well, we can all debate for a moment where those things came from.
But they're equally clearly not interested in talking to us. Otherwise they'd have done so.
So, how will our life change in knowing that we've gone from "it's extremely likely things are out there" to "yep, things are out there, and they're probably spying on us"?
Unless you can actually communicate with said lifeforms (and I think we can assume they would be signalling us if they wanted to communicate), how is our life different in knowing that they really are out there?
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Step 1 is to gain insight, of which right now we have very little. Rationalise as best we can any threat level, which is radically different depending upon whether UAP are human origin or “other”. Threat being capability x intent. There’s been a long period already to make this assessment. So let’s hear it please.
Step 2 is to pass the subject out the hands of the security apparatus and into civilian science. As the US government report describes its “catch all other bin” of categorisation, “pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”. Hence the ground breaking comments by sections of civilian science already emerging in the months since that statement. But we haven’t yet had the transfer moment from Step 1 to Step 2, more is the pity, the data are kept under a cloud of national security and still only being drip fed.
Step 3, In time, we may then learn how to unleash beneficial technology that would transform global society. Some apes have been observed to spear fish, a skill acquired through observing humans. Despite humans never having tried to teach them that or anything else, nor interfering with their social hierarchies, and being widely apathetic rather than antagonist to their fate.
Still, we are thinking beings. So perhaps there is a Step 4 that allows us to learn our place in the cosmos, our history and our future. Which I guess would entail some kind of direct interaction with the Pentagon’s “catch all other bin”.
Unsettling for most people to think about that of course, it’s easier to outsource those questions to scripture writers and focus on day to day life. And probably leads to a happier life all said and done. And if that’s your bag then fine, ignore the dreadnought floating in geostationary orbit. That is what most people are doing.
Sure. i don't disagree with much of that, I'm just glad you are thinking about it so I don't have to. I just think that the chances of us being in an ape:human ratio to the new guys are vanishingly slim, we are more likely in a cockroach:human ratio. and whether we are or not, we are just gonna have to wait to hear from them. What I firmly do not believe is that joe/the Pentagon are on to the phone to them every night. The progression in the past 5 years has been from the US military knowing nothing, to admitting that they know nothing. Step in the right direction, but no more.
That rather depends on whether you believe one or two of the more prominent government whistleblowers. That say far more is understood than you assume, because there has been fairly consistent study since before most of us on here were born.
What still fascinates me is the total divergence in policy and media coverage between the US and UK. It is amazing to me that such high level public discussion is now being had about this in the US and yet almost everyone in the uk remains ignorant of that. Whether you think it’s aliens, Russians, a US Psy-ops programme or a bizarre and sophisticated hoodwinking of pillars of the US establishment for lolz. It’s still a bigger story than anything else, covid included.
They say breakthrough infections in those previously infected are twice the rate as for Delta (bad)
But for the fully vaccinated the efficacy goes down just from 95 to 90% (good).
But isn’t that vaccine data equivalent to a doubling of breakthrough risk (10% vs 5%)?
Still pretty decent data to be honest, because both numbers suggest immune escape isn’t that great.
Yes whilst still being good a drop from 95% to 90% means that the risk has doubled. My immediate view is that it's not as bad as feared, but still bad enough to potentially cause some big problems in a population where vaccination is limited or waning. For the UK we really need to get cracking with the boosters, and look at what can be done to get the unvaccinated to change their minds.
If this SA/Israeli data verifies, the pressure on the unvaxxed will be intense. Likewise the pressure on governments to badger the unvaxxed into submission
Why should the rest of us tolerate lockdown and horror to save their sorry asses?
The PM was asked about the 5 m totally unvaxxed (journalist's figure) today. Answer came there none. If they start filling the hospitals again this will become untenable.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Because the possible presence of non human intelligence in our skies and seas is absolutely fascinating. Surely?
Almost as fascinating is the shrugging reaction from humans….
Statistically, of course other beings are out there. It's a massive universe.
But let's assume that there are videos that the military have taken, showing *things*. Well, we can all debate for a moment where those things came from.
But they're equally clearly not interested in talking to us. Otherwise they'd have done so.
So, how will our life change in knowing that we've gone from "it's extremely likely things are out there" to "yep, things are out there, and they're probably spying on us"?
Unless you can actually communicate with said lifeforms (and I think we can assume they would be signalling us if they wanted to communicate), how is our life different in knowing that they really are out there?
It's probably worthwhile working out: Are they Russian? Or Chinese? If they're not and are from somewhere else, it might be that that's not provable. So even if we decide "somewhere else," isn't interesting we still might have to ask what they are.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
What a relief - if it is true. But what a scary number for the unvaxxed. Get yer fucking jab, @Dura_Ace
Maybe we could strike a bargain with Dura. If he gets his jab, we’ll see how many people here we can get to go meatless the day after.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Because the possible presence of non human intelligence in our skies and seas is absolutely fascinating. Surely?
Almost as fascinating is the shrugging reaction from humans….
Statistically, of course other beings are out there. It's a massive universe.
But let's assume that there are videos that the military have taken, showing *things*. Well, we can all debate for a moment where those things came from.
But they're equally clearly not interested in talking to us. Otherwise they'd have done so.
So, how will our life change in knowing that we've gone from "it's extremely likely things are out there" to "yep, things are out there, and they're probably spying on us"?
Unless you can actually communicate with said lifeforms (and I think we can assume they would be signalling us if they wanted to communicate), how is our life different in knowing that they really are out there?
Well the answer is no change at all, because we’ve already made that step. At least no change yet. Depends on what happens next doesnt it. But I’m encouraged to hear you thinking this through now.
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
Can you talk us through the numbers, or give a link? The Uk population is about 70 million, of whom 70% are fully vaccinated. Assume that nobody who is fully vaccinated catches a case of Covid serious enough to be hospitalised. That leaves 24 million people who are not fully vaccinated yet. You say that if they were all exposed to the virus tomorrow, less than 0.2% would be hospitalised? That would be excellent news, but it doesn't sound right.
Sure, the number of people in the UK is ~67m of whom 46m 18+ are double vaxxed, in addition monitoring by Cambridge and Imperial shows that a further 13-17m kids and adults have immunity from prior infection. Then number of virus naive people in the UK is now thought to be between 5m and 8m people mostly in younger age categories.
Additionally, hospitalisation is not uniform among age groups in the UK vaccine uptake among the key 60+ age group is close to 100% so the potential for hospitalisations is low in an age group that is most at risk of being hospitalised. PHE regularly produces an antibody monitoring study for UK adults and in those key age groups antibody presence from vaccines is almost always above 95% of those sampled and overall antibody presence is close to 100% when antibodies produced by natural infection are rolled in.
Finally, the spread of virus naive people is primarily in the under 24 age category due to lower vaccination rates, the hospitalisation rate for these people is very low, as in if it's 1/10,000 being hospitalised that would be a surprise. For kids under 12 where there is no vaccination but high natural immunity there is almost zero hospitalisation, during the whole pandemic only a few hundred kids have needed hospital treatment and the survival rate is almost 100%.
The Delta exit wave has essentially filled in the immunity gaps that the UK had after our reasonable but not outstanding vaccine campaign.
Aiui the number will get smaller as more over 60s get their third doses.
The 4.5m single jabbed, of whom many will be recently jabbed 12-18s with good immune responses, are not vaccine naive either. Not sure how they are considered in the model, and might be a worthwhile modifier on this categorisation.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Step 1 is to gain insight, of which right now we have very little. Rationalise as best we can any threat level, which is radically different depending upon whether UAP are human origin or “other”. Threat being capability x intent. There’s been a long period already to make this assessment. So let’s hear it please.
Step 2 is to pass the subject out the hands of the security apparatus and into civilian science. As the US government report describes its “catch all other bin” of categorisation, “pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”. Hence the ground breaking comments by sections of civilian science already emerging in the months since that statement. But we haven’t yet had the transfer moment from Step 1 to Step 2, more is the pity, the data are kept under a cloud of national security and still only being drip fed.
Step 3, In time, we may then learn how to unleash beneficial technology that would transform global society. Some apes have been observed to spear fish, a skill acquired through observing humans. Despite humans never having tried to teach them that or anything else, nor interfering with their social hierarchies, and being widely apathetic rather than antagonist to their fate.
Still, we are thinking beings. So perhaps there is a Step 4 that allows us to learn our place in the cosmos, our history and our future. Which I guess would entail some kind of direct interaction with the Pentagon’s “catch all other bin”.
Unsettling for most people to think about that of course, it’s easier to outsource those questions to scripture writers and focus on day to day life. And probably leads to a happier life all said and done. And if that’s your bag then fine, ignore the dreadnought floating in geostationary orbit. That is what most people are doing.
Sure. i don't disagree with much of that, I'm just glad you are thinking about it so I don't have to. I just think that the chances of us being in an ape:human ratio to the new guys are vanishingly slim, we are more likely in a cockroach:human ratio. and whether we are or not, we are just gonna have to wait to hear from them. What I firmly do not believe is that joe/the Pentagon are on to the phone to them every night. The progression in the past 5 years has been from the US military knowing nothing, to admitting that they know nothing. Step in the right direction, but no more.
That rather depends on whether you believe one or two of the more prominent government whistleblowers. That say far more is understood than you assume, because there has been fairly consistent study since before most of us on here were born.
What still fascinates me is the total divergence in policy and media coverage between the US and UK. It is amazing to me that such high level public discussion is now being had about this in the US and yet almost everyone in the uk remains ignorant of that. Whether you think it’s aliens, Russians, a US Psy-ops programme or a bizarre and sophisticated hoodwinking of pillars of the US establishment for lolz. It’s still a bigger story than anything else, covid included.
Yes. I am not ignorant and not in denial, I just don't see any useful way for me to react.
They say breakthrough infections in those previously infected are twice the rate as for Delta (bad)
But for the fully vaccinated the efficacy goes down just from 95 to 90% (good).
But isn’t that vaccine data equivalent to a doubling of breakthrough risk (10% vs 5%)?
Still pretty decent data to be honest, because both numbers suggest immune escape isn’t that great.
Yes whilst still being good a drop from 95% to 90% means that the risk has doubled. My immediate view is that it's not as bad as feared, but still bad enough to potentially cause some big problems in a population where vaccination is limited or waning. For the UK we really need to get cracking with the boosters, and look at what can be done to get the unvaccinated to change their minds.
If this SA/Israeli data verifies, the pressure on the unvaxxed will be intense. Likewise the pressure on governments to badger the unvaxxed into submission
Why should the rest of us tolerate lockdown and horror to save their sorry asses?
The PM was asked about the 5 m totally unvaxxed (journalist's figure) today. Answer came there none. If they start filling the hospitals again this will become untenable.
Why is Dura refusing the Bill Gates sponsored microchipping?
Tested on animals.
Wasn't it reported the other day some youngish guy who was a vegan and objected for that very reason died after catching COVID.....his dying words, he wished he had got it.
Yes… hobby was driving fast cars… I was actually worried it was @Dura_Ace
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Step 1 is to gain insight, of which right now we have very little. Rationalise as best we can any threat level, which is radically different depending upon whether UAP are human origin or “other”. Threat being capability x intent. There’s been a long period already to make this assessment. So let’s hear it please.
Step 2 is to pass the subject out the hands of the security apparatus and into civilian science. As the US government report describes its “catch all other bin” of categorisation, “pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”. Hence the ground breaking comments by sections of civilian science already emerging in the months since that statement. But we haven’t yet had the transfer moment from Step 1 to Step 2, more is the pity, the data are kept under a cloud of national security and still only being drip fed.
Step 3, In time, we may then learn how to unleash beneficial technology that would transform global society. Some apes have been observed to spear fish, a skill acquired through observing humans. Despite humans never having tried to teach them that or anything else, nor interfering with their social hierarchies, and being widely apathetic rather than antagonist to their fate.
Still, we are thinking beings. So perhaps there is a Step 4 that allows us to learn our place in the cosmos, our history and our future. Which I guess would entail some kind of direct interaction with the Pentagon’s “catch all other bin”.
Unsettling for most people to think about that of course, it’s easier to outsource those questions to scripture writers and focus on day to day life. And probably leads to a happier life all said and done. And if that’s your bag then fine, ignore the dreadnought floating in geostationary orbit. That is what most people are doing.
Sure. i don't disagree with much of that, I'm just glad you are thinking about it so I don't have to. I just think that the chances of us being in an ape:human ratio to the new guys are vanishingly slim, we are more likely in a cockroach:human ratio. and whether we are or not, we are just gonna have to wait to hear from them. What I firmly do not believe is that joe/the Pentagon are on to the phone to them every night. The progression in the past 5 years has been from the US military knowing nothing, to admitting that they know nothing. Step in the right direction, but no more.
That rather depends on whether you believe one or two of the more prominent government whistleblowers. That say far more is understood than you assume, because there has been fairly consistent study since before most of us on here were born.
What still fascinates me is the total divergence in policy and media coverage between the US and UK. It is amazing to me that such high level public discussion is now being had about this in the US and yet almost everyone in the uk remains ignorant of that. Whether you think it’s aliens, Russians, a US Psy-ops programme or a bizarre and sophisticated hoodwinking of pillars of the US establishment for lolz. It’s still a bigger story than anything else, covid included.
Yes. I am not ignorant and not in denial, I just don't see any useful way for me to react.
One useful way for society to react would be a collective demand for transparency. Even if “our side” cracked some of this tech before the Chinese or Russians or whoever, it would have the potential to completely tip over the democratic bargain.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Step 1 is to gain insight, of which right now we have very little. Rationalise as best we can any threat level, which is radically different depending upon whether UAP are human origin or “other”. Threat being capability x intent. There’s been a long period already to make this assessment. So let’s hear it please.
Step 2 is to pass the subject out the hands of the security apparatus and into civilian science. As the US government report describes its “catch all other bin” of categorisation, “pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”. Hence the ground breaking comments by sections of civilian science already emerging in the months since that statement. But we haven’t yet had the transfer moment from Step 1 to Step 2, more is the pity, the data are kept under a cloud of national security and still only being drip fed.
Step 3, In time, we may then learn how to unleash beneficial technology that would transform global society. Some apes have been observed to spear fish, a skill acquired through observing humans. Despite humans never having tried to teach them that or anything else, nor interfering with their social hierarchies, and being widely apathetic rather than antagonist to their fate.
Still, we are thinking beings. So perhaps there is a Step 4 that allows us to learn our place in the cosmos, our history and our future. Which I guess would entail some kind of direct interaction with the Pentagon’s “catch all other bin”.
Unsettling for most people to think about that of course, it’s easier to outsource those questions to scripture writers and focus on day to day life. And probably leads to a happier life all said and done. And if that’s your bag then fine, ignore the dreadnought floating in geostationary orbit. That is what most people are doing.
Sure. i don't disagree with much of that, I'm just glad you are thinking about it so I don't have to. I just think that the chances of us being in an ape:human ratio to the new guys are vanishingly slim, we are more likely in a cockroach:human ratio. and whether we are or not, we are just gonna have to wait to hear from them. What I firmly do not believe is that joe/the Pentagon are on to the phone to them every night. The progression in the past 5 years has been from the US military knowing nothing, to admitting that they know nothing. Step in the right direction, but no more.
That rather depends on whether you believe one or two of the more prominent government whistleblowers. That say far more is understood than you assume, because there has been fairly consistent study since before most of us on here were born.
What still fascinates me is the total divergence in policy and media coverage between the US and UK. It is amazing to me that such high level public discussion is now being had about this in the US and yet almost everyone in the uk remains ignorant of that. Whether you think it’s aliens, Russians, a US Psy-ops programme or a bizarre and sophisticated hoodwinking of pillars of the US establishment for lolz. It’s still a bigger story than anything else, covid included.
The quickest way to lose all your money is to assume the government is smarter and better informed than you.
They say breakthrough infections in those previously infected are twice the rate as for Delta (bad)
But for the fully vaccinated the efficacy goes down just from 95 to 90% (good).
But isn’t that vaccine data equivalent to a doubling of breakthrough risk (10% vs 5%)?
Still pretty decent data to be honest, because both numbers suggest immune escape isn’t that great.
Yes whilst still being good a drop from 95% to 90% means that the risk has doubled. My immediate view is that it's not as bad as feared, but still bad enough to potentially cause some big problems in a population where vaccination is limited or waning. For the UK we really need to get cracking with the boosters, and look at what can be done to get the unvaccinated to change their minds.
If this SA/Israeli data verifies, the pressure on the unvaxxed will be intense. Likewise the pressure on governments to badger the unvaxxed into submission
Why should the rest of us tolerate lockdown and horror to save their sorry asses?
The PM was asked about the 5 m totally unvaxxed (journalist's figure) today. Answer came there none. If they start filling the hospitals again this will become untenable.
Using ONS mid-2020..... the following number of people who haven't had 2 vaccinations.
And yes, I know about the 75-79 range.
The important point is the numbers in the older groups.
12 to 15 2,659,626 16 to 17 990,637 18 to 24 1,575,681 25 to 29 1,117,392 30 to 34 835,071 35 to 39 670,625 40 to 44 405,680 45 to 49 483,325 50 to 54 298,613 55 to 59 181,295 60 to 64 78,879 65 to 69 119,413 70 to 74 132,125 75 to 79 -36,523 80 to 84 82,898 85 to 89 43,808 90 upwards 54,861
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Because the possible presence of non human intelligence in our skies and seas is absolutely fascinating. Surely?
Almost as fascinating is the shrugging reaction from humans….
Statistically, of course other beings are out there. It's a massive universe.
But let's assume that there are videos that the military have taken, showing *things*. Well, we can all debate for a moment where those things came from.
But they're equally clearly not interested in talking to us. Otherwise they'd have done so.
So, how will our life change in knowing that we've gone from "it's extremely likely things are out there" to "yep, things are out there, and they're probably spying on us"?
Unless you can actually communicate with said lifeforms (and I think we can assume they would be signalling us if they wanted to communicate), how is our life different in knowing that they really are out there?
Whenever I see anyone mentioning communicating with aliens I am reminded of the Kurt Vonnegut story Breakfast of Champions where the aliens communicate by tapdancing and farting.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Step 1 is to gain insight, of which right now we have very little. Rationalise as best we can any threat level, which is radically different depending upon whether UAP are human origin or “other”. Threat being capability x intent. There’s been a long period already to make this assessment. So let’s hear it please.
Step 2 is to pass the subject out the hands of the security apparatus and into civilian science. As the US government report describes its “catch all other bin” of categorisation, “pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”. Hence the ground breaking comments by sections of civilian science already emerging in the months since that statement. But we haven’t yet had the transfer moment from Step 1 to Step 2, more is the pity, the data are kept under a cloud of national security and still only being drip fed.
Step 3, In time, we may then learn how to unleash beneficial technology that would transform global society. Some apes have been observed to spear fish, a skill acquired through observing humans. Despite humans never having tried to teach them that or anything else, nor interfering with their social hierarchies, and being widely apathetic rather than antagonist to their fate.
Still, we are thinking beings. So perhaps there is a Step 4 that allows us to learn our place in the cosmos, our history and our future. Which I guess would entail some kind of direct interaction with the Pentagon’s “catch all other bin”.
Unsettling for most people to think about that of course, it’s easier to outsource those questions to scripture writers and focus on day to day life. And probably leads to a happier life all said and done. And if that’s your bag then fine, ignore the dreadnought floating in geostationary orbit. That is what most people are doing.
Sure. i don't disagree with much of that, I'm just glad you are thinking about it so I don't have to. I just think that the chances of us being in an ape:human ratio to the new guys are vanishingly slim, we are more likely in a cockroach:human ratio. and whether we are or not, we are just gonna have to wait to hear from them. What I firmly do not believe is that joe/the Pentagon are on to the phone to them every night. The progression in the past 5 years has been from the US military knowing nothing, to admitting that they know nothing. Step in the right direction, but no more.
That rather depends on whether you believe one or two of the more prominent government whistleblowers. That say far more is understood than you assume, because there has been fairly consistent study since before most of us on here were born.
What still fascinates me is the total divergence in policy and media coverage between the US and UK. It is amazing to me that such high level public discussion is now being had about this in the US and yet almost everyone in the uk remains ignorant of that. Whether you think it’s aliens, Russians, a US Psy-ops programme or a bizarre and sophisticated hoodwinking of pillars of the US establishment for lolz. It’s still a bigger story than anything else, covid included.
Yes. I am not ignorant and not in denial, I just don't see any useful way for me to react.
One useful way for society to react would be a collective demand for transparency. Even if “our side” cracked some of this tech before the Chinese or Russians or whoever, it would have the potential to completely tip over the democratic bargain.
The idea that we could 'crack' the alien technology that is seen in a few blurry navy photos is laughable.
It's like thinking that - because you've seen a jet powered plane, that you could build one. Only in this analogy, you're not human, you're an ant.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Step 1 is to gain insight, of which right now we have very little. Rationalise as best we can any threat level, which is radically different depending upon whether UAP are human origin or “other”. Threat being capability x intent. There’s been a long period already to make this assessment. So let’s hear it please.
Step 2 is to pass the subject out the hands of the security apparatus and into civilian science. As the US government report describes its “catch all other bin” of categorisation, “pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”. Hence the ground breaking comments by sections of civilian science already emerging in the months since that statement. But we haven’t yet had the transfer moment from Step 1 to Step 2, more is the pity, the data are kept under a cloud of national security and still only being drip fed.
Step 3, In time, we may then learn how to unleash beneficial technology that would transform global society. Some apes have been observed to spear fish, a skill acquired through observing humans. Despite humans never having tried to teach them that or anything else, nor interfering with their social hierarchies, and being widely apathetic rather than antagonist to their fate.
Still, we are thinking beings. So perhaps there is a Step 4 that allows us to learn our place in the cosmos, our history and our future. Which I guess would entail some kind of direct interaction with the Pentagon’s “catch all other bin”.
Unsettling for most people to think about that of course, it’s easier to outsource those questions to scripture writers and focus on day to day life. And probably leads to a happier life all said and done. And if that’s your bag then fine, ignore the dreadnought floating in geostationary orbit. That is what most people are doing.
Sure. i don't disagree with much of that, I'm just glad you are thinking about it so I don't have to. I just think that the chances of us being in an ape:human ratio to the new guys are vanishingly slim, we are more likely in a cockroach:human ratio. and whether we are or not, we are just gonna have to wait to hear from them. What I firmly do not believe is that joe/the Pentagon are on to the phone to them every night. The progression in the past 5 years has been from the US military knowing nothing, to admitting that they know nothing. Step in the right direction, but no more.
That rather depends on whether you believe one or two of the more prominent government whistleblowers. That say far more is understood than you assume, because there has been fairly consistent study since before most of us on here were born.
What still fascinates me is the total divergence in policy and media coverage between the US and UK. It is amazing to me that such high level public discussion is now being had about this in the US and yet almost everyone in the uk remains ignorant of that. Whether you think it’s aliens, Russians, a US Psy-ops programme or a bizarre and sophisticated hoodwinking of pillars of the US establishment for lolz. It’s still a bigger story than anything else, covid included.
The quickest way to lose all your money is to assume the government is smarter and better informed than you.
Yea it’s a chastening day when you learn about the Smart Room Paradox. That there is no room of smart people who have shit figured out and are taking care of things, it’s just a world of loosely connected blaggers. That is almost certainly true on this topic too. Except… we now know there was at least one office investigating this stuff for a very long time and that they are yet to publicly share a fraction of their data.
Interesting to me that years ago Obama joked he asked when he was first President, show me the ufo files. And his staffers came back some time later empty handed saying there was nothing. We now know about the Nimitz Incident, prior to his presidency, quite a bit now being public record. And yet taken at his word, Obama wasn’t told about it when he specifically asked. Quite a concerning gap in the chain of command, by stigma and mismanagement, or conspiracy, who knows?
I agree that we should lean to cockup. But if this story has been actively buried for a long time, there’s going to be a fierce vested interest in keeping it buried by the perpetrators until they’re long dead given they’d likely be facing life in jail.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Step 1 is to gain insight, of which right now we have very little. Rationalise as best we can any threat level, which is radically different depending upon whether UAP are human origin or “other”. Threat being capability x intent. There’s been a long period already to make this assessment. So let’s hear it please.
Step 2 is to pass the subject out the hands of the security apparatus and into civilian science. As the US government report describes its “catch all other bin” of categorisation, “pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”. Hence the ground breaking comments by sections of civilian science already emerging in the months since that statement. But we haven’t yet had the transfer moment from Step 1 to Step 2, more is the pity, the data are kept under a cloud of national security and still only being drip fed.
Step 3, In time, we may then learn how to unleash beneficial technology that would transform global society. Some apes have been observed to spear fish, a skill acquired through observing humans. Despite humans never having tried to teach them that or anything else, nor interfering with their social hierarchies, and being widely apathetic rather than antagonist to their fate.
Still, we are thinking beings. So perhaps there is a Step 4 that allows us to learn our place in the cosmos, our history and our future. Which I guess would entail some kind of direct interaction with the Pentagon’s “catch all other bin”.
Unsettling for most people to think about that of course, it’s easier to outsource those questions to scripture writers and focus on day to day life. And probably leads to a happier life all said and done. And if that’s your bag then fine, ignore the dreadnought floating in geostationary orbit. That is what most people are doing.
Sure. i don't disagree with much of that, I'm just glad you are thinking about it so I don't have to. I just think that the chances of us being in an ape:human ratio to the new guys are vanishingly slim, we are more likely in a cockroach:human ratio. and whether we are or not, we are just gonna have to wait to hear from them. What I firmly do not believe is that joe/the Pentagon are on to the phone to them every night. The progression in the past 5 years has been from the US military knowing nothing, to admitting that they know nothing. Step in the right direction, but no more.
That rather depends on whether you believe one or two of the more prominent government whistleblowers. That say far more is understood than you assume, because there has been fairly consistent study since before most of us on here were born.
What still fascinates me is the total divergence in policy and media coverage between the US and UK. It is amazing to me that such high level public discussion is now being had about this in the US and yet almost everyone in the uk remains ignorant of that. Whether you think it’s aliens, Russians, a US Psy-ops programme or a bizarre and sophisticated hoodwinking of pillars of the US establishment for lolz. It’s still a bigger story than anything else, covid included.
The general view in the UK media, indeed most European media I think, is that it's still all a bit of a joke. But in fact it isn't.
Beyond the situation of moving the investigation of the phenomena from military to civilian scientists, I agree with those saying that it's very difficult to see what we do about it, though, in practical terms.
However, the existential and philosophical implication is obviously important.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Step 1 is to gain insight, of which right now we have very little. Rationalise as best we can any threat level, which is radically different depending upon whether UAP are human origin or “other”. Threat being capability x intent. There’s been a long period already to make this assessment. So let’s hear it please.
Step 2 is to pass the subject out the hands of the security apparatus and into civilian science. As the US government report describes its “catch all other bin” of categorisation, “pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”. Hence the ground breaking comments by sections of civilian science already emerging in the months since that statement. But we haven’t yet had the transfer moment from Step 1 to Step 2, more is the pity, the data are kept under a cloud of national security and still only being drip fed.
Step 3, In time, we may then learn how to unleash beneficial technology that would transform global society. Some apes have been observed to spear fish, a skill acquired through observing humans. Despite humans never having tried to teach them that or anything else, nor interfering with their social hierarchies, and being widely apathetic rather than antagonist to their fate.
Still, we are thinking beings. So perhaps there is a Step 4 that allows us to learn our place in the cosmos, our history and our future. Which I guess would entail some kind of direct interaction with the Pentagon’s “catch all other bin”.
Unsettling for most people to think about that of course, it’s easier to outsource those questions to scripture writers and focus on day to day life. And probably leads to a happier life all said and done. And if that’s your bag then fine, ignore the dreadnought floating in geostationary orbit. That is what most people are doing.
Sure. i don't disagree with much of that, I'm just glad you are thinking about it so I don't have to. I just think that the chances of us being in an ape:human ratio to the new guys are vanishingly slim, we are more likely in a cockroach:human ratio. and whether we are or not, we are just gonna have to wait to hear from them. What I firmly do not believe is that joe/the Pentagon are on to the phone to them every night. The progression in the past 5 years has been from the US military knowing nothing, to admitting that they know nothing. Step in the right direction, but no more.
You seem to be assuming the US military has told all it knows .....
The US have known about this (to a degree at least) for years, they have lied and lied and I don't think they are done with that yet.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Step 1 is to gain insight, of which right now we have very little. Rationalise as best we can any threat level, which is radically different depending upon whether UAP are human origin or “other”. Threat being capability x intent. There’s been a long period already to make this assessment. So let’s hear it please.
Step 2 is to pass the subject out the hands of the security apparatus and into civilian science. As the US government report describes its “catch all other bin” of categorisation, “pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”. Hence the ground breaking comments by sections of civilian science already emerging in the months since that statement. But we haven’t yet had the transfer moment from Step 1 to Step 2, more is the pity, the data are kept under a cloud of national security and still only being drip fed.
Step 3, In time, we may then learn how to unleash beneficial technology that would transform global society. Some apes have been observed to spear fish, a skill acquired through observing humans. Despite humans never having tried to teach them that or anything else, nor interfering with their social hierarchies, and being widely apathetic rather than antagonist to their fate.
Still, we are thinking beings. So perhaps there is a Step 4 that allows us to learn our place in the cosmos, our history and our future. Which I guess would entail some kind of direct interaction with the Pentagon’s “catch all other bin”.
Unsettling for most people to think about that of course, it’s easier to outsource those questions to scripture writers and focus on day to day life. And probably leads to a happier life all said and done. And if that’s your bag then fine, ignore the dreadnought floating in geostationary orbit. That is what most people are doing.
Sure. i don't disagree with much of that, I'm just glad you are thinking about it so I don't have to. I just think that the chances of us being in an ape:human ratio to the new guys are vanishingly slim, we are more likely in a cockroach:human ratio. and whether we are or not, we are just gonna have to wait to hear from them. What I firmly do not believe is that joe/the Pentagon are on to the phone to them every night. The progression in the past 5 years has been from the US military knowing nothing, to admitting that they know nothing. Step in the right direction, but no more.
That rather depends on whether you believe one or two of the more prominent government whistleblowers. That say far more is understood than you assume, because there has been fairly consistent study since before most of us on here were born.
What still fascinates me is the total divergence in policy and media coverage between the US and UK. It is amazing to me that such high level public discussion is now being had about this in the US and yet almost everyone in the uk remains ignorant of that. Whether you think it’s aliens, Russians, a US Psy-ops programme or a bizarre and sophisticated hoodwinking of pillars of the US establishment for lolz. It’s still a bigger story than anything else, covid included.
Yes. I am not ignorant and not in denial, I just don't see any useful way for me to react.
One useful way for society to react would be a collective demand for transparency. Even if “our side” cracked some of this tech before the Chinese or Russians or whoever, it would have the potential to completely tip over the democratic bargain.
The idea that we could 'crack' the alien technology that is seen in a few blurry navy photos is laughable.
It's like thinking that - because you've seen a jet powered plane, that you could build one. Only in this analogy, you're not human, you're an ant.
I don’t think that’s true. Because ants cannot reason and we can. I don’t think anyone has demonstrated that our brains have an upper limit beyond which technological or scientific progress is impossible? And sure, there a limit to what you can learn from photos and videos. But what if there was a concerted effort to build a UAP global monitoring system? Or if they are physical technological phenomena, to attempt to retrieve material?
If we take it that they are real, how do you suppose the Chinese government is thinking about this?
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Step 1 is to gain insight, of which right now we have very little. Rationalise as best we can any threat level, which is radically different depending upon whether UAP are human origin or “other”. Threat being capability x intent. There’s been a long period already to make this assessment. So let’s hear it please.
Step 2 is to pass the subject out the hands of the security apparatus and into civilian science. As the US government report describes its “catch all other bin” of categorisation, “pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”. Hence the ground breaking comments by sections of civilian science already emerging in the months since that statement. But we haven’t yet had the transfer moment from Step 1 to Step 2, more is the pity, the data are kept under a cloud of national security and still only being drip fed.
Step 3, In time, we may then learn how to unleash beneficial technology that would transform global society. Some apes have been observed to spear fish, a skill acquired through observing humans. Despite humans never having tried to teach them that or anything else, nor interfering with their social hierarchies, and being widely apathetic rather than antagonist to their fate.
Still, we are thinking beings. So perhaps there is a Step 4 that allows us to learn our place in the cosmos, our history and our future. Which I guess would entail some kind of direct interaction with the Pentagon’s “catch all other bin”.
Unsettling for most people to think about that of course, it’s easier to outsource those questions to scripture writers and focus on day to day life. And probably leads to a happier life all said and done. And if that’s your bag then fine, ignore the dreadnought floating in geostationary orbit. That is what most people are doing.
Sure. i don't disagree with much of that, I'm just glad you are thinking about it so I don't have to. I just think that the chances of us being in an ape:human ratio to the new guys are vanishingly slim, we are more likely in a cockroach:human ratio. and whether we are or not, we are just gonna have to wait to hear from them. What I firmly do not believe is that joe/the Pentagon are on to the phone to them every night. The progression in the past 5 years has been from the US military knowing nothing, to admitting that they know nothing. Step in the right direction, but no more.
That rather depends on whether you believe one or two of the more prominent government whistleblowers. That say far more is understood than you assume, because there has been fairly consistent study since before most of us on here were born.
What still fascinates me is the total divergence in policy and media coverage between the US and UK. It is amazing to me that such high level public discussion is now being had about this in the US and yet almost everyone in the uk remains ignorant of that. Whether you think it’s aliens, Russians, a US Psy-ops programme or a bizarre and sophisticated hoodwinking of pillars of the US establishment for lolz. It’s still a bigger story than anything else, covid included.
The quickest way to lose all your money is to assume the government is smarter and better informed than you.
The second quickest way to lose all your money is to assume that you are smarter and better informed than HMRC.
They say breakthrough infections in those previously infected are twice the rate as for Delta (bad)
But for the fully vaccinated the efficacy goes down just from 95 to 90% (good).
But isn’t that vaccine data equivalent to a doubling of breakthrough risk (10% vs 5%)?
Still pretty decent data to be honest, because both numbers suggest immune escape isn’t that great.
Yes whilst still being good a drop from 95% to 90% means that the risk has doubled. My immediate view is that it's not as bad as feared, but still bad enough to potentially cause some big problems in a population where vaccination is limited or waning. For the UK we really need to get cracking with the boosters, and look at what can be done to get the unvaccinated to change their minds.
If this SA/Israeli data verifies, the pressure on the unvaxxed will be intense. Likewise the pressure on governments to badger the unvaxxed into submission
Why should the rest of us tolerate lockdown and horror to save their sorry asses?
The PM was asked about the 5 m totally unvaxxed (journalist's figure) today. Answer came there none. If they start filling the hospitals again this will become untenable.
Fuck 'em.
I still support people being allowed to remain unvaccinated.
But.
I feel they should be obliged, at an appropriate point in the vaccine roll out, to sort in front of a vaccination nurse and 'have a discussion'.
The obligatory vaccination of a narrow range of close contact professions is fine.
Obligatory vaccination on our side for any trip abroad anywhere is fine.
We have a little time to design a viable and limited lockdown of the unvaccinated to be rolled in if Hospitalisations creep back into the iffy range. I'd prefer we avoided vaxports, but if it comes to that to enforce a lockdown of the unvaxxed, then fine.
All this should be planned and ready to go, but hopefully much of it will prove moot.
I'm very prepared to impinge on the unvaccinated, but just out of any necessity, not out of a desire to punish their dodgy choices.
If I had had COVID, I'd have second thoughts about getting boosted - as it is I am up for the booster - but, if this goes on, I could see that becoming untenable as well.
They say breakthrough infections in those previously infected are twice the rate as for Delta (bad)
But for the fully vaccinated the efficacy goes down just from 95 to 90% (good).
But isn’t that vaccine data equivalent to a doubling of breakthrough risk (10% vs 5%)?
Still pretty decent data to be honest, because both numbers suggest immune escape isn’t that great.
Yes whilst still being good a drop from 95% to 90% means that the risk has doubled. My immediate view is that it's not as bad as feared, but still bad enough to potentially cause some big problems in a population where vaccination is limited or waning. For the UK we really need to get cracking with the boosters, and look at what can be done to get the unvaccinated to change their minds.
If this SA/Israeli data verifies, the pressure on the unvaxxed will be intense. Likewise the pressure on governments to badger the unvaxxed into submission
Why should the rest of us tolerate lockdown and horror to save their sorry asses?
The PM was asked about the 5 m totally unvaxxed (journalist's figure) today. Answer came there none. If they start filling the hospitals again this will become untenable.
Using ONS mid-2020..... the following number of people who haven't had 2 vaccinations.
And yes, I know about the 75-79 range.
The important point is the numbers in the older groups.
12 to 15 2,659,626 16 to 17 990,637 18 to 24 1,575,681 25 to 29 1,117,392 30 to 34 835,071 35 to 39 670,625 40 to 44 405,680 45 to 49 483,325 50 to 54 298,613 55 to 59 181,295 60 to 64 78,879 65 to 69 119,413 70 to 74 132,125 75 to 79 -36,523 80 to 84 82,898 85 to 89 43,808 90 upwards 54,861
So, at a broad guess, less than two million people over the age of 40 haven't been vaccinated (some unjabbed under-40s will fall prey to plague, of course, but not that many.) And a substantial fraction of them will have infection-derived immunity by this point as well. Thus the remaining pool of unvaccinated and uninfected adults who are at significant risk of hospitalisation must be quite modest.
The pandemic can therefore only come roaring back in the event of a quantum leap in the ability of the virus both to re-infect people and to evade the protection against serious illness offered by vaccination or by natural infection and recovery. And there's no particular reason to suppose that the evolutionary process of vaccine escape will be anything other than gradual.
Looks like the NHS vaccine booking site is getting serious heavy traffic as they had to implement queuing system.
That’s good to hear. Like most I’ve been pretty put off by much of the government’s output the last year but I actually thought Boris came across dare I say, as Prime Ministerial today. If the booster hotline is ringing off the hook then he’s done his job.
A shame Philip’s school has ignored him on nativity plays though. We’re going to have a very disappointed little boy in this house if the same happens to him.
Just watched the most dominant victory in football ever. Possession 86-14, Shots 64-0, Shots on target 31-0, corners 15-0. The result; England Ladies 20, Latvia Ladies 0. Four hat tricks and one player scored 4 having never scored before.
Not sure its sport if its so one sided that the only question is how big a thrashing one team gives another.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Step 1 is to gain insight, of which right now we have very little. Rationalise as best we can any threat level, which is radically different depending upon whether UAP are human origin or “other”. Threat being capability x intent. There’s been a long period already to make this assessment. So let’s hear it please.
Step 2 is to pass the subject out the hands of the security apparatus and into civilian science. As the US government report describes its “catch all other bin” of categorisation, “pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”. Hence the ground breaking comments by sections of civilian science already emerging in the months since that statement. But we haven’t yet had the transfer moment from Step 1 to Step 2, more is the pity, the data are kept under a cloud of national security and still only being drip fed.
Step 3, In time, we may then learn how to unleash beneficial technology that would transform global society. Some apes have been observed to spear fish, a skill acquired through observing humans. Despite humans never having tried to teach them that or anything else, nor interfering with their social hierarchies, and being widely apathetic rather than antagonist to their fate.
Still, we are thinking beings. So perhaps there is a Step 4 that allows us to learn our place in the cosmos, our history and our future. Which I guess would entail some kind of direct interaction with the Pentagon’s “catch all other bin”.
Unsettling for most people to think about that of course, it’s easier to outsource those questions to scripture writers and focus on day to day life. And probably leads to a happier life all said and done. And if that’s your bag then fine, ignore the dreadnought floating in geostationary orbit. That is what most people are doing.
Sure. i don't disagree with much of that, I'm just glad you are thinking about it so I don't have to. I just think that the chances of us being in an ape:human ratio to the new guys are vanishingly slim, we are more likely in a cockroach:human ratio. and whether we are or not, we are just gonna have to wait to hear from them. What I firmly do not believe is that joe/the Pentagon are on to the phone to them every night. The progression in the past 5 years has been from the US military knowing nothing, to admitting that they know nothing. Step in the right direction, but no more.
That rather depends on whether you believe one or two of the more prominent government whistleblowers. That say far more is understood than you assume, because there has been fairly consistent study since before most of us on here were born.
What still fascinates me is the total divergence in policy and media coverage between the US and UK. It is amazing to me that such high level public discussion is now being had about this in the US and yet almost everyone in the uk remains ignorant of that. Whether you think it’s aliens, Russians, a US Psy-ops programme or a bizarre and sophisticated hoodwinking of pillars of the US establishment for lolz. It’s still a bigger story than anything else, covid included.
Yes. I am not ignorant and not in denial, I just don't see any useful way for me to react.
One useful way for society to react would be a collective demand for transparency. Even if “our side” cracked some of this tech before the Chinese or Russians or whoever, it would have the potential to completely tip over the democratic bargain.
The idea that we could 'crack' the alien technology that is seen in a few blurry navy photos is laughable.
It's like thinking that - because you've seen a jet powered plane, that you could build one. Only in this analogy, you're not human, you're an ant.
I don’t think that’s true. Because ants cannot reason and we can. I don’t think anyone has demonstrated that our brains have an upper limit beyond which technological or scientific progress is impossible? And sure, there a limit to what you can learn from photos and videos. But what if there was a concerted effort to build a UAP global monitoring system? Or if they are physical technological phenomena, to attempt to retrieve material?
If we take it that they are real, how do you suppose the Chinese government is thinking about this?
Unfortunately I expect that will be even more difficult than finding out precisely what U.S. governmental agencies think about the whole thing.
I do think certain public intellectuals, particularly scientists like Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins, have contributed to an atmosphere of complacent over-confidence about our place in the universe, though.
This kind of doubt is a useful corrective to false certainties.
Which five PBers do you think are likeliest to be up on that bridge?
The spelling seems all in order so that narrows it down a bit.
I note that their were no spelling mistake in your post. Hmm.
Curses, my false flag op to portray the open hearted, absolutely not xenophobic English in a bad light has been rumbled!
Where even is that picture? I see an England flag in there, but honestly that's no guarantee.
Entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel apparently which would be kinda fitting.
Are all the Union flags the right way up? That is normally another dead giveaway.
And I'm sorry but what in the holy fuck is a 'white nation'?
Isn't that what Enoch Powell wished to preserve, or rather return to?
Which reminds me of striking South African miners in the 1920s: "White Workers of the World Unite!"
AND also of "White Australia" which was official policy of all governments left or right until after WW2.
And these guys (or gals) are equally deluded. To me what it sadly smacks of is the racial purity laws of another era.
Powell was, a sI understand it, more complex than his reputation - he basically wanted to preserve Britain in aspic, but he was also keen on preserving traditional values. When the two collided, with the Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin, he said we should take them all in, because we'd promised, and Britain should never break a promise. I expect he'd have felt the same about Hong Kong Chinese. I'm not excusing his prejudice, but there was a certain underlying honour there too which some of the folk who revere his memory do not necessarily possess.
Just watched the most dominant victory in football ever. Possession 86-14, Shots 64-0, Shots on target 31-0, corners 15-0. The result; England Ladies 20, Latvia Ladies 0. Four hat tricks and one player scored 4 having never scored before.
Not sure its sport if its so one sided that the only question is how big a thrashing one team gives another.
Remarkably it isn't even close to being the most dominant victory in football ever.
To match that record, the shots on target would have had to be all goals. The record for most one-sided game by scoreline is 31-0 with 6 players getting hat tricks (3 of those players getting 5 goals): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_31–0_American_Samoa
Just watched the most dominant victory in football ever. Possession 86-14, Shots 64-0, Shots on target 31-0, corners 15-0. The result; England Ladies 20, Latvia Ladies 0. Four hat tricks and one player scored 4 having never scored before.
Not sure its sport if its so one sided that the only question is how big a thrashing one team gives another.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Step 1 is to gain insight, of which right now we have very little. Rationalise as best we can any threat level, which is radically different depending upon whether UAP are human origin or “other”. Threat being capability x intent. There’s been a long period already to make this assessment. So let’s hear it please.
Step 2 is to pass the subject out the hands of the security apparatus and into civilian science. As the US government report describes its “catch all other bin” of categorisation, “pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them”. Hence the ground breaking comments by sections of civilian science already emerging in the months since that statement. But we haven’t yet had the transfer moment from Step 1 to Step 2, more is the pity, the data are kept under a cloud of national security and still only being drip fed.
Step 3, In time, we may then learn how to unleash beneficial technology that would transform global society. Some apes have been observed to spear fish, a skill acquired through observing humans. Despite humans never having tried to teach them that or anything else, nor interfering with their social hierarchies, and being widely apathetic rather than antagonist to their fate.
Still, we are thinking beings. So perhaps there is a Step 4 that allows us to learn our place in the cosmos, our history and our future. Which I guess would entail some kind of direct interaction with the Pentagon’s “catch all other bin”.
Unsettling for most people to think about that of course, it’s easier to outsource those questions to scripture writers and focus on day to day life. And probably leads to a happier life all said and done. And if that’s your bag then fine, ignore the dreadnought floating in geostationary orbit. That is what most people are doing.
Sure. i don't disagree with much of that, I'm just glad you are thinking about it so I don't have to. I just think that the chances of us being in an ape:human ratio to the new guys are vanishingly slim, we are more likely in a cockroach:human ratio. and whether we are or not, we are just gonna have to wait to hear from them. What I firmly do not believe is that joe/the Pentagon are on to the phone to them every night. The progression in the past 5 years has been from the US military knowing nothing, to admitting that they know nothing. Step in the right direction, but no more.
That rather depends on whether you believe one or two of the more prominent government whistleblowers. That say far more is understood than you assume, because there has been fairly consistent study since before most of us on here were born.
What still fascinates me is the total divergence in policy and media coverage between the US and UK. It is amazing to me that such high level public discussion is now being had about this in the US and yet almost everyone in the uk remains ignorant of that. Whether you think it’s aliens, Russians, a US Psy-ops programme or a bizarre and sophisticated hoodwinking of pillars of the US establishment for lolz. It’s still a bigger story than anything else, covid included.
Yes. I am not ignorant and not in denial, I just don't see any useful way for me to react.
One useful way for society to react would be a collective demand for transparency. Even if “our side” cracked some of this tech before the Chinese or Russians or whoever, it would have the potential to completely tip over the democratic bargain.
The idea that we could 'crack' the alien technology that is seen in a few blurry navy photos is laughable.
It's like thinking that - because you've seen a jet powered plane, that you could build one. Only in this analogy, you're not human, you're an ant.
I don’t think that’s true. Because ants cannot reason and we can. I don’t think anyone has demonstrated that our brains have an upper limit beyond which technological or scientific progress is impossible? And sure, there a limit to what you can learn from photos and videos. But what if there was a concerted effort to build a UAP global monitoring system? Or if they are physical technological phenomena, to attempt to retrieve material?
If we take it that they are real, how do you suppose the Chinese government is thinking about this?
Unfortunately I expect that will be more difficult than finding out precisely what U.S. governmental agencies think.
Indeed. The cultural gap to bridge is a canyon compared with the USSR. But… the Chinese leadership is rational and science based, if entirely self interested and a bit racist. So all round no worse than the typical US government. So you never know.
Just watched the most dominant victory in football ever. Possession 86-14, Shots 64-0, Shots on target 31-0, corners 15-0. The result; England Ladies 20, Latvia Ladies 0. Four hat tricks and one player scored 4 having never scored before.
Not sure its sport if its so one sided that the only question is how big a thrashing one team gives another.
Just watched the most dominant victory in football ever. Possession 86-14, Shots 64-0, Shots on target 31-0, corners 15-0. The result; England Ladies 20, Latvia Ladies 0. Four hat tricks and one player scored 4 having never scored before.
Not sure its sport if its so one sided that the only question is how big a thrashing one team gives another.
Remarkably it isn't even close to being the most dominant victory in football ever.
To match that record, the shots on target would have had to be all goals. The record for most one-sided game by scoreline is 31-0 with 6 players getting hat tricks (3 of those players getting 5 goals): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_31–0_American_Samoa
The biggest margin in INTERNATIONAL football. The biggest margin in do.estic football is, ISTR, Arbroath 36-0 defeat of Bon Accord some way back at the dawn of the professional era. That's in the UK, anyway...
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
I take a look most every night. It's a thrilling notion. But then again so is being utterly alone.
Just watched the most dominant victory in football ever. Possession 86-14, Shots 64-0, Shots on target 31-0, corners 15-0. The result; England Ladies 20, Latvia Ladies 0. Four hat tricks and one player scored 4 having never scored before.
Not sure its sport if its so one sided that the only question is how big a thrashing one team gives another.
Remarkably it isn't even close to being the most dominant victory in football ever.
To match that record, the shots on target would have had to be all goals. The record for most one-sided game by scoreline is 31-0 with 6 players getting hat tricks (3 of those players getting 5 goals): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_31–0_American_Samoa
The biggest margin in INTERNATIONAL football. The biggest margin in do.estic football is, ISTR, Arbroath 36-0 defeat of Bon Accord some way back at the dawn of the professional era. That's in the UK, anyway...
What about next season in the championship, Saudi Utd vs MK Dons?
Which five PBers do you think are likeliest to be up on that bridge?
The spelling seems all in order so that narrows it down a bit.
I note that their were no spelling mistake in your post. Hmm.
Curses, my false flag op to portray the open hearted, absolutely not xenophobic English in a bad light has been rumbled!
Where even is that picture? I see an England flag in there, but honestly that's no guarantee.
Entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel apparently which would be kinda fitting.
Are all the Union flags the right way up? That is normally another dead giveaway.
And I'm sorry but what in the holy fuck is a 'white nation'?
Isn't that what Enoch Powell wished to preserve, or rather return to?
Which reminds me of striking South African miners in the 1920s: "White Workers of the World Unite!"
AND also of "White Australia" which was official policy of all governments left or right until after WW2.
And these guys (or gals) are equally deluded. To me what it sadly smacks of is the racial purity laws of another era.
Trouble is that, at a visceral level, I get the fear.
There are places in England where it's been possible to grow up and live without encountering people who don't look, sound or think like you. And for most of us, it's blooming scary to have your mental map upended like that. And for avoidance of doubt, that's as true of overeducated nowheresville liberals as it is of people in the white flight on the edge of a big city, or people who have spent their life in a single small town and are baffled as to why anyone would want to leave.
Question has always been what we do with that genuine and human feeling.
It's not helpful to mock it or patronise it, even though we all do. But equally, using it as an organising principle is to go into a dead end, where life is less interesting and literally poorer.
Part of the answer is about how we generate and share wealth- people are generally more willing to be expansive when they feel they have enough themselves, and a lot of the inward turn the UK has taken recently has been because of the sense (incorrect, I think) that we can't even afford to look after ourselves, let alone anyone else. But part of it is also recognising that pure Britain is a delusion, and not one that wise politicians or opinion-mongers should indulge.
But that's only a part answer.
How great it would be if everybody would be nice to each other for a change.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
What a relief - if it is true. But what a scary number for the unvaxxed. Get yer fucking jab, @Dura_Ace
Maybe we could strike a bargain with Dura. If he gets his jab, we’ll see how many people here we can get to go meatless the day after.
I'm in. I'll do three days meat free to keep the cantankerous old fucker alive.
Yep, me too. 3 days without meat. Pescatarian allowed?
In return Dura has to get the jab. He can save his life while saving about 100 animals and maybe turning 2 of us veggie, if we like the experience. Win win
I’m in for that too. I’ll go three days meat free if the grumpy old git gets his jab. He’s funny at times.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
What a relief - if it is true. But what a scary number for the unvaxxed. Get yer fucking jab, @Dura_Ace
Maybe we could strike a bargain with Dura. If he gets his jab, we’ll see how many people here we can get to go meatless the day after.
I'm in. I'll do three days meat free to keep the cantankerous old fucker alive.
Yep, me too. 3 days without meat. Pescatarian allowed?
In return Dura has to get the jab. He can save his life while saving about 100 animals and maybe turning 2 of us veggie, if we like the experience. Win win
I’m in for that too. I’ll go three days meat free if the grumpy old git gets his jab. He’s funny at times.
Me too. I'm still flexitarian but will gladly skip meat altogether for 3 days as part of the deal.
Which five PBers do you think are likeliest to be up on that bridge?
The spelling seems all in order so that narrows it down a bit.
I note that their were no spelling mistake in your post. Hmm.
Curses, my false flag op to portray the open hearted, absolutely not xenophobic English in a bad light has been rumbled!
Where even is that picture? I see an England flag in there, but honestly that's no guarantee.
Entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel apparently which would be kinda fitting.
Are all the Union flags the right way up? That is normally another dead giveaway.
And I'm sorry but what in the holy fuck is a 'white nation'?
Isn't that what Enoch Powell wished to preserve, or rather return to?
Which reminds me of striking South African miners in the 1920s: "White Workers of the World Unite!"
AND also of "White Australia" which was official policy of all governments left or right until after WW2.
And these guys (or gals) are equally deluded. To me what it sadly smacks of is the racial purity laws of another era.
Trouble is that, at a visceral level, I get the fear.
There are places in England where it's been possible to grow up and live without encountering people who don't look, sound or think like you. And for most of us, it's blooming scary to have your mental map upended like that. And for avoidance of doubt, that's as true of overeducated nowheresville liberals as it is of people in the white flight on the edge of a big city, or people who have spent their life in a single small town and are baffled as to why anyone would want to leave.
Question has always been what we do with that genuine and human feeling.
It's not helpful to mock it or patronise it, even though we all do. But equally, using it as an organising principle is to go into a dead end, where life is less interesting and literally poorer.
Part of the answer is about how we generate and share wealth- people are generally more willing to be expansive when they feel they have enough themselves, and a lot of the inward turn the UK has taken recently has been because of the sense (incorrect, I think) that we can't even afford to look after ourselves, let alone anyone else. But part of it is also recognising that pure Britain is a delusion, and not one that wise politicians or opinion-mongers should indulge.
But that's only a part answer.
How great it would be if everybody would be nice to each other for a change.
I get that and can't really see much to disagree with in what you say - or at least in what you advocate and aspire to. The trouble is that we have had 50 years of trying, reasonably and with understanding, to help these people realise that the people who look different them are not the enemy and are not here to murder us in our beds etc. Much of the population now realise that. They have non white friends, neighbours and colleagues and understand they are just like us. At some point you have to address the hard core and their irrational hatred of others based on perceived rather than actual differences.
I am not talking in this instance about accepting unrestricted immigration, for all that I might personally favour it. I see the arguments on the other side. What I cannot see and can no longer accept after all these years is the racial purity rubbish spouted by the BNP types. Advocating a 'white nation' goes far beyond reasoned concerns. There is no reasonable or reasoned way to answer such views. They have to be challenged directly and denounced.
From the wording, it seems the third candidate is still in the race?
Hopefully the CIA won't be using the same tactics as in 1973, the last time an avowed left-wing democrat, somewhat comparable to a 1970's Chilean Lula of Brazil, who they recast as a communist, was in pole position there...
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
What a relief - if it is true. But what a scary number for the unvaxxed. Get yer fucking jab, @Dura_Ace
Maybe we could strike a bargain with Dura. If he gets his jab, we’ll see how many people here we can get to go meatless the day after.
I'm in. I'll do three days meat free to keep the cantankerous old fucker alive.
Yep, me too. 3 days without meat. Pescatarian allowed?
In return Dura has to get the jab. He can save his life while saving about 100 animals and maybe turning 2 of us veggie, if we like the experience. Win win
I’m in for that too. I’ll go three days meat free if the grumpy old git gets his jab. He’s funny at times.
Me too. I'm still flexitarian but will gladly skip meat altogether for 3 days as part of the deal.
I will do a month, since I regularly go three days without meat anyway.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
What a relief - if it is true. But what a scary number for the unvaxxed. Get yer fucking jab, @Dura_Ace
Maybe we could strike a bargain with Dura. If he gets his jab, we’ll see how many people here we can get to go meatless the day after.
I'm in. I'll do three days meat free to keep the cantankerous old fucker alive.
Yep, me too. 3 days without meat. Pescatarian allowed?
In return Dura has to get the jab. He can save his life while saving about 100 animals and maybe turning 2 of us veggie, if we like the experience. Win win
I’m in for that too. I’ll go three days meat free if the grumpy old git gets his jab. He’s funny at times.
Just watched the most dominant victory in football ever. Possession 86-14, Shots 64-0, Shots on target 31-0, corners 15-0. The result; England Ladies 20, Latvia Ladies 0. Four hat tricks and one player scored 4 having never scored before.
Not sure its sport if its so one sided that the only question is how big a thrashing one team gives another.
Remarkably it isn't even close to being the most dominant victory in football ever.
To match that record, the shots on target would have had to be all goals. The record for most one-sided game by scoreline is 31-0 with 6 players getting hat tricks (3 of those players getting 5 goals): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_31–0_American_Samoa
The biggest margin in INTERNATIONAL football. The biggest margin in do.estic football is, ISTR, Arbroath 36-0 defeat of Bon Accord some way back at the dawn of the professional era. That's in the UK, anyway...
What about next season in the championship, Saudi Utd vs MK Dons?
You think MK Dons are going to put more than 36 past the Saudis?
‘UPDATE: 5x COVID hospitalizations increase ⬆️ in 2 weeks in Gauteng Province 🇿🇦, #Omicron epicenter. This is an increase from 3x over the weekend (for same 2 week period). Partial report of latest week also suggests hospitalizations are accelerating. 🧵 #COVID19 (from @nicd_sa)’
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
Now @kinabalu , previously @IanB2, both of whom can run circles around you on their level of intelligence going by all your respective posts, yet you post about their intelligence in an unnecessary and demeaning way. I can only assume they have you rattled. Last time you blamed it on women and booze. What's the excuse tonight?
Very good figures, same day last week comparable are: 42484/165/768
And Starmer just now saying the measures do not go far enough
For all his faults, and he has many, I am pleased Boris is PM at this moment and not Starmer
They have both rolled the dice today and both are potential hostages to fortune. Johnson for Christmas WON'T be cancelled and Starmer for stuff like 8 day isolation for inbound travellers etc, etc. It all depends on events.
For what it's worth I hope Johnson's gamble pays off. If it doesn't we are all up the creek. If Starmer is wrong it matters not one way nor the other, he is in oopposition. Remember, no one blames the Conservatives for invading Iraq.
Although we should, at least to some extent. Had Iain Duncan Smith had the brains to ask the right questions he could have stopped British involvement dead in its tracks.
A real tragedy Kenneth Clarke, who was asking the right questions and noticed he was getting all the wrong answers, was not Leader of the Opposition at the time.
Comments
But let's assume that there are videos that the military have taken, showing *things*. Well, we can all debate for a moment where those things came from.
But they're equally clearly not interested in talking to us. Otherwise they'd have done so.
So, how will our life change in knowing that we've gone from "it's extremely likely things are out there" to "yep, things are out there, and they're probably spying on us"?
Unless you can actually communicate with said lifeforms (and I think we can assume they would be signalling us if they wanted to communicate), how is our life different in knowing that they really are out there?
What still fascinates me is the total divergence in policy and media coverage between the US and UK. It is amazing to me that such high level public discussion is now being had about this in the US and yet almost everyone in the uk remains ignorant of that. Whether you think it’s aliens, Russians, a US Psy-ops programme or a bizarre and sophisticated hoodwinking of pillars of the US establishment for lolz. It’s still a bigger story than anything else, covid included.
And I'm sorry but what in the holy fuck is a 'white nation'?
And yes, I know about the 75-79 range.
The important point is the numbers in the older groups.
12 to 15 2,659,626
16 to 17 990,637
18 to 24 1,575,681
25 to 29 1,117,392
30 to 34 835,071
35 to 39 670,625
40 to 44 405,680
45 to 49 483,325
50 to 54 298,613
55 to 59 181,295
60 to 64 78,879
65 to 69 119,413
70 to 74 132,125
75 to 79 -36,523
80 to 84 82,898
85 to 89 43,808
90 upwards 54,861
It's like thinking that - because you've seen a jet powered plane, that you could build one. Only in this analogy, you're not human, you're an ant.
Interesting to me that years ago Obama joked he asked when he was first President, show me the ufo files. And his staffers came back some time later empty handed saying there was nothing. We now know about the Nimitz Incident, prior to his presidency, quite a bit now being public record. And yet taken at his word, Obama wasn’t told about it when he specifically asked. Quite a concerning gap in the chain of command, by stigma and mismanagement, or conspiracy, who knows?
I agree that we should lean to cockup. But if this story has been actively buried for a long time, there’s going to be a fierce vested interest in keeping it buried by the perpetrators until they’re long dead given they’d likely be facing life in jail.
Beyond the situation of moving the investigation of the phenomena from military to civilian scientists, I agree with those saying that it's very difficult to see what we do about it, though, in practical terms.
However, the existential and philosophical implication is obviously important.
The US have known about this (to a degree at least) for years, they have lied and lied and I don't think they are done with that yet.
Edit - Its the Telegraph being knobheads again, that is just what MP voted on as the sunset clause date.
If we take it that they are real, how do you suppose the Chinese government is thinking about this?
Which reminds me of striking South African miners in the 1920s: "White Workers of the World Unite!"
AND also of "White Australia" which was official policy of all governments left or right until after WW2.
But.
I feel they should be obliged, at an appropriate point in the vaccine roll out, to sort in front of a vaccination nurse and 'have a discussion'.
The obligatory vaccination of a narrow range of close contact professions is fine.
Obligatory vaccination on our side for any trip abroad anywhere is fine.
We have a little time to design a viable and limited lockdown of the unvaccinated to be rolled in if Hospitalisations creep back into the iffy range. I'd prefer we avoided vaxports, but if it comes to that to enforce a lockdown of the unvaxxed, then fine.
All this should be planned and ready to go, but hopefully much of it will prove moot.
I'm very prepared to impinge on the unvaccinated, but just out of any necessity, not out of a desire to punish their dodgy choices.
If I had had COVID, I'd have second thoughts about getting boosted - as it is I am up for the booster - but, if this goes on, I could see that becoming untenable as well.
The pandemic can therefore only come roaring back in the event of a quantum leap in the ability of the virus both to re-infect people and to evade the protection against serious illness offered by vaccination or by natural infection and recovery. And there's no particular reason to suppose that the evolutionary process of vaccine escape will be anything other than gradual.
A shame Philip’s school has ignored him on nativity plays though. We’re going to have a very disappointed little boy in this house if the same happens to him.
I do think certain public intellectuals, particularly scientists like Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins, have contributed to an atmosphere of complacent over-confidence about our place in the universe, though.
This kind of doubt is a useful corrective to false certainties.
To match that record, the shots on target would have had to be all goals. The record for most one-sided game by scoreline is 31-0 with 6 players getting hat tricks (3 of those players getting 5 goals): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_31–0_American_Samoa
£5 to charity of choice for anyone who gets the reference.....
The biggest margin in do.estic football is, ISTR, Arbroath 36-0 defeat of Bon Accord some way back at the dawn of the professional era.
That's in the UK, anyway...
There are places in England where it's been possible to grow up and live without encountering people who don't look, sound or think like you. And for most of us, it's blooming scary to have your mental map upended like that. And for avoidance of doubt, that's as true of overeducated nowheresville liberals as it is of people in the white flight on the edge of a big city, or people who have spent their life in a single small town and are baffled as to why anyone would want to leave.
Question has always been what we do with that genuine and human feeling.
It's not helpful to mock it or patronise it, even though we all do. But equally, using it as an organising principle is to go into a dead end, where life is less interesting and literally poorer.
Part of the answer is about how we generate and share wealth- people are generally more willing to be expansive when they feel they have enough themselves, and a lot of the inward turn the UK has taken recently has been because of the sense (incorrect, I think) that we can't even afford to look after ourselves, let alone anyone else. But part of it is also recognising that pure Britain is a delusion, and not one that wise politicians or opinion-mongers should indulge.
But that's only a part answer.
How great it would be if everybody would be nice to each other for a change.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnmightycat/5588691031/
I am not talking in this instance about accepting unrestricted immigration, for all that I might personally favour it. I see the arguments on the other side. What I cannot see and can no longer accept after all these years is the racial purity rubbish spouted by the BNP types. Advocating a 'white nation' goes far beyond reasoned concerns. There is no reasonable or reasoned way to answer such views. They have to be challenged directly and denounced.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/leftist-chile-presidential-candidate-leads-new-poll-dec-19-vote-looms-2021-11-29/
From the wording, it seems the third candidate is still in the race?
https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/mclaren-f1-driver-norris-to-move-to-monaco-from-uk/6836826/
‘South Africa reports 4,373 new coronavirus cases, an increase of 404% from last weeks
https://twitter.com/bnodesk/status/1465728934763536388?s=21
‘UPDATE: 5x COVID hospitalizations increase ⬆️ in 2 weeks in Gauteng Province 🇿🇦, #Omicron epicenter. This is an increase from 3x over the weekend (for same 2 week period). Partial report of latest week also suggests hospitalizations are accelerating. 🧵 #COVID19 (from @nicd_sa)’
https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1465788414326976518?s=21
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/30/merck-covid-pill/
Should all be rotting in the Hague.