Hypothetical question. Smoke alarms are there not to prevent fire but to prevent death. Fire in house. Alarms allow the safe evacuation of inhabitants.
Will their insurance company refuse to pay out because their functional alarms which worked as intended were not the specific type required by Scotland's new law?
Most insurance policies have a clause about complying with legislation. But that's always so far been about things like building codes (which Grenfell did!). So it's a letter vs spirit of the law question...
Messing around with insurance companies is probably not a smart move in general. If you give them a loophole to get out of paying, or paying less than you expect, then don't be surprised if they take it. It seems that's the assessors job post-incident.
I'm going to get it done because I can. But as 95% of existing smoke alarms are not compliant there will be an awful lot of people who won't be. Because they don't know, can't afford it, or think it's stupid.
So it's back down to how much of a row the insurance industry wants to have up here. Invalidating one person's policy because they had functional smoke alarms that did their job is one thing. If they try and do that to a lot of people, it may be the insurers in trouble.
I suspect that insurance companies will be more reasonable than jobsworth bureaucrats.
Er... Insurance companies are staffed with jobsworth bureaucrats.
According to the new standards I need to fit alarms on either side of my living room door. Which makes total sense really...
Question - is not hearing an alarm somewhere inside a single property really a thing?
Obviously, interconnected systems make sense in blocks of flats. But unless you accidentally live in Edinburgh Castle, is there really a problem with not hearing fire alarms in the kitchen from the bedroom etc?
Every minute counts and if you are upstairs , doors closed there is a very good chance you will not hear immediately. Seconds can make a difference so I would rather be safe than sorry.
My kids have headphones on a lot of the time. Bedroom door shut + headphones on means they wouldn’t hear an alarm if it was only going off in the kitchen with the kitchen door shut.
I made a point of putting in a set of wired in smoke alarms throughout the house when we renovated it: if one goes off they all go off (plus a heat alarm in the kitchen). Plus I read the kids the riot act: if they weren’t at the front door within thirty seconds after an alarm going off then privilieges (i.e. internet access) would be pulled.
Fire is no joke.
Happily my now non-compliant and imminently illegal alarms set off all the Google devices including the phone my son would be listening to music on. Which is why I will be keeping them as my primary system even as and when a set of dumb compliant alarms go in.
Are the Nest ones actually non-compliant though? Does the legislation specify wired together, or are the radio links Nest devices use sufficient?
Manufacturers have warned that Brexit will add to soaring costs facing British industry, amid concerns that customs delays and red tape will rank among the biggest challenges for firms this year.
Make UK, the industry body representing 20,000 manufacturing firms of all sizes from across the country, said that while optimism among its members had grown, it was being undermined by the after-effects of the UK’s departure from the EU.
One year on from the end of the transition period, two-thirds of industrial company leaders in its survey of 228 firms said Brexit had moderately or significantly hampered their business. More than half of firms warned they were likely to suffer further damage this year from customs delays due to import checks and changes to product labelling.
According to the 2022 MakeUK/PwC senior executive survey, Brexit disruption remains among the biggest concerns facing industry bosses for the year ahead as Britain’s departure from the EU complicates the fallout from Covid-19 and the rising costs facing companies.
Delays at customs, the additional costs from meeting separate regulatory regimes in the UK and the EU, and reduced access to migrant workers were among top concerns raised in the survey.
The British company that bid on the passports put in a ludicrous bid, thinking that because they were British they would win. It was one of those government-contract-will-fill-the-pension-fund-hole-and-pay-c-suite-bonus bids.
I discovered recently that my son's passport is over a year out of date, so he will be the first in our family to enjoy the dubious honour of the new shit passport. Poor kid, utterly failed by the older generation. At least he has an American passport to fall back on.
Errr ... the US passport is as valuable as the UK's, which is as valuable as many other European countries, at least according to this ranking:
However, aesthetically I think the US passport is the best in the world, with images on each page of the great sights of the US - the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and so on. We should do similar in our passport - the Tower of London, Durham Cathedral and so on.
That's bollocks. The ranking you cite is based on visa free holiday travel or short business trips. My son's UK passport used to entitle him to total freedom to live and work in an economy of 400mn odd people. Luckily he still has the opportunity to do that in the US but not via his UK passport. Would be ironic if we put a picture of the Tower of London - symbol of subjugation by an invading continental power - on our French/Polish Brexit passport.
That UK/EU passport also gave 450m EU people the right to live, work, claim benefits, or sell the Big Issue while also claiming benefits, in the UK. So it gave your son rights but it also drove up UK house prices, increased UK homelessness, put intense pressure on UK schools, doctors, etc, and lowered wages for many ordinary UK workers. And it meant non European migrants in mainland EU could simply shift to the UK, about which we could do nothing.
Which puts a somewhat different gloss on the “desirability” of an EU passport
On Djokovic it has just been reported that should the Federal Australian government proceed as rumoured to expel him from Australia, he will be banned from re-entering Australia for 3 years and no doubt cause him problems worldwide
Surely the Australian Government have to accept defeat on this now. They clearly cocked-up. Time to move on.
Of course not, most Australian voters are on the side of the Federal Government not Djokovic and this is an election year
If Novax gets to defend his title there will be quite an edge to some of his matches. Compulsive viewing I'd say, and a nice little earner for the TV viewing rights holder.
I have a feeling the crowd will make their views known, in a way that’s usually more suited to football than tennis.
This is the first time China has admitted to proper Omicron outbreaks. Could be a big 2022 story
Yep. Fk knows why the markets are so sanguine. It’s entirely predictable that China vs Omicron seriously screws up international trade for a good while.
China is desparate to keep it away until after the Olympics, by whatever means necessary.
Yes, we can still see the knock-on effects of the factory shutdowns in China, more than a year later. There’s still a huge computer chip shortage everywhere, from cars to PS5s and RTX3090s.
Cars are an entirely self inflected issue - PS5s and video cards are demand constrained but cars issues are a direct consequence of annoying your suppliers enough that you are no longer, priority customers.
it also drove up UK house prices, increased UK homelessness, put intense pressure on UK schools, doctors, etc, and lowered wages for many ordinary UK workers. And it meant non European migrants in mainland EU could simply shift to the UK, about which we could do nothing.
Brexit is a solution to exactly zero of those concerns
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
I don't see why its not a great look? Until now an LFT positive followed by a PCR negative has been treated as a false positive.
Given that you can very easily fake an LFT positive (I believe Lemonade triggers a positive) I have little faith in its credibility.
If LFTs are causing positives but PCRs aren't finding them then that's a really serious problem that should be getting discussed.
I think that was before they switched to nasal only testing. If anything the balance has switched significantly towards LFTs producing false negatives.
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
Do you think he means asymptomatic then? Why do you say that he doesn't mean false positives? There have been examples.
I don't know. Just going on what I've read here, false positives basically don't happen.
LFT specificity 99.9%. Odds of 13 false positives about .
Either the PCRs were false negatives (Lab error) or the lfts were from a duff batch (That brand of LFTs need to be withdrawn from the market immediately). Either way there's more story than blindly putting out '13 false positives'.
And your nonsense about 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 odds is the same sort of innumerate nonsense that Professor Meadow came up with to get Sally Clark falsely convicted of murder. If something is wrong systemically you can't multiply the odds like that.
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
I don't see why its not a great look? Until now an LFT positive followed by a PCR negative has been treated as a false positive.
Given that you can very easily fake an LFT positive (I believe Lemonade triggers a positive) I have little faith in its credibility.
If LFTs are causing positives but PCRs aren't finding them then that's a really serious problem that should be getting discussed.
Unless you're deliberately messing up the test, the rate of false positives for LFTs is around one in a thousand.
Hypothetical question. Smoke alarms are there not to prevent fire but to prevent death. Fire in house. Alarms allow the safe evacuation of inhabitants.
Will their insurance company refuse to pay out because their functional alarms which worked as intended were not the specific type required by Scotland's new law?
Most insurance policies have a clause about complying with legislation. But that's always so far been about things like building codes (which Grenfell did!). So it's a letter vs spirit of the law question...
Messing around with insurance companies is probably not a smart move in general. If you give them a loophole to get out of paying, or paying less than you expect, then don't be surprised if they take it. It seems that's the assessors job post-incident.
I'm going to get it done because I can. But as 95% of existing smoke alarms are not compliant there will be an awful lot of people who won't be. Because they don't know, can't afford it, or think it's stupid.
So it's back down to how much of a row the insurance industry wants to have up here. Invalidating one person's policy because they had functional smoke alarms that did their job is one thing. If they try and do that to a lot of people, it may be the insurers in trouble.
I suspect that insurance companies will be more reasonable than jobsworth bureaucrats.
Er... Insurance companies are staffed with jobsworth bureaucrats.
According to the new standards I need to fit alarms on either side of my living room door. Which makes total sense really...
Question - is not hearing an alarm somewhere inside a single property really a thing?
Obviously, interconnected systems make sense in blocks of flats. But unless you accidentally live in Edinburgh Castle, is there really a problem with not hearing fire alarms in the kitchen from the bedroom etc?
Every minute counts and if you are upstairs , doors closed there is a very good chance you will not hear immediately. Seconds can make a difference so I would rather be safe than sorry.
My kids have headphones on a lot of the time. Bedroom door shut + headphones on means they wouldn’t hear an alarm if it was only going off in the kitchen with the kitchen door shut.
I made a point of putting in a set of wired in smoke alarms throughout the house when we renovated it: if one goes off they all go off (plus a heat alarm in the kitchen). Plus I read the kids the riot act: if they weren’t at the front door within thirty seconds after an alarm going off then privilieges (i.e. internet access) would be pulled.
Fire is no joke.
Happily my now non-compliant and imminently illegal alarms set off all the Google devices including the phone my son would be listening to music on. Which is why I will be keeping them as my primary system even as and when a set of dumb compliant alarms go in.
Are the Nest ones actually non-compliant though? Does the legislation specify wired together, or are the radio links Nest devices use sufficient?
Non-compliant because Google don't make a separate heat alarm for the kitchen. I believe mine are also non-compliant because replaceable batteries rather than mains, but that's the whole point - if your mains gets knocked out by fire you want an independent power source. They also create their own non-wifi Mesh network so so risk if wifi goes down.
On Djokovic it has just been reported that should the Federal Australian government proceed as rumoured to expel him from Australia, he will be banned from re-entering Australia for 3 years and no doubt cause him problems worldwide
Surely the Australian Government have to accept defeat on this now. They clearly cocked-up. Time to move on.
Of course not, most Australian voters are on the side of the Federal Government not Djokovic and this is an election year
Well that’s the pickle they’ve got themselves into, isn’t it…
This is the first time China has admitted to proper Omicron outbreaks. Could be a big 2022 story
Yep. Fk knows why the markets are so sanguine. It’s entirely predictable that China vs Omicron seriously screws up international trade for a good while.
Yes, that’s how I see it. Surprised this isn’t bigger news. Omicron will surely sweep across China now. Not a killer like Delta but enough to shutter a lot of factories etc
They will surely have to abandon “zero Covid”. Lockdowns against Omicron just don’t work, long term
Mr. Tubbs, given the choice between more NHS staff and them not all being vaccinated or fewer and 100% vaccination I'd be inclined to go for the former.
Policies that decrease the number of doctors and nurses do not seem helpful.
I must say I have doubts about doctors and nurses who oppose modern medical practice on crackpot grounds.
If they're so against vaccination how can they be trusted to not let their beliefs interfere with their work.
Its like having a science teacher that doesn't believe in evolution, or a Police Officer who doesn't follow the law himself, or a politician who doesn't believe in the rule of law.
Some might consider all those to be normal though.
Not all opposition to getting vaccinated (especially if you’ve had prior infection) is that scientifically crackpot though, is it?
I can also understand (if not agree) why some sports people (especially again if prior infected) are reluctant to get jabbed - given there are side effects which can be quite disruptive to training schedules etc if at all lingering. This isn’t in general a high risk population. The case for mass vaccination is often a case for, well, mass vaccination - the case isn’t always so clear cut for all individuals. Hell JCVI even said the case was “balanced” for teenagers in general, so it’s hardly a big step to suggest it might be the same for young elite sports people when the decision ultimately remains one for individual choice.
JCVI managed that by using a probable infection rate for children that was ludicrously low.
Strangely, no one seems to have put together the fact that we have quite a few people in the younger groups going into hospital and their vaccination status.
The following is the Case to Admissions ratio for England....
Not that this will surprise many people here but Help To Buy was a waste of money and the money should have been directly spent on social housing - a Lord's report says
I know a number of people who bought their first properties through Help to Buy.
Plus while some Tory councils like mine are building more social homes even in 2019 most living in social housing voted Labour. A Tory government will want to create more Tory voters owning their first property not more Labour voters in social housing
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
Do you think he means asymptomatic then? Why do you say that he doesn't mean false positives? There have been examples.
I don't know. Just going on what I've read here, false positives basically don't happen.
LFT specificity 99.9%. Odds of 13 false positives about 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001.
Either the PCRs were false negatives (Lab error) or the lfts were from a duff batch (That brand of LFTs need to be withdrawn from the market immediately). Either way there's more story than blindly putting out '13 false positives'.
"In March 2020, internal documents leaked to The Intercept revealed that moderators had been instructed to suppress posts created by users deemed "too ugly, poor, or disabled" for the platform, and to censor political speech in livestreams, punishing those who harmed "national honor" or broadcast streams about "state organs such as police" with bans from the platform."
I have never bothered with TikTok. Somebody once described it to me as "For people whose attention span is too small for YouTube Shorts". So surely that would mean that TikTok news coverage would be something like "Here is the news. Thank you for watching. More news in an hour"
I've never really bothered with it either, beyond understanding what it is. I've always thought of it as being ok as entertainment but a poor medium to discuss anything remotely serious.
What stood out to me was Nadia Whittome (MP) saying in a newspaper interview that she doesn't watch films, she spends her evenings on tic tok. These are the people we elect to parliament.
She’s far from alone. An awful lot of people have totally abandoned old patterns of media usage, eg tv. Watching tv has become a sign that you are way out of the game.
That's pretty appalling about TikTok. But I've not had a TV for years - I'd rather watch movies when it's convenient than when they happen to be broadcast, so Netflix works for me. I recently spent a few nights in the guest room of someone who was recently widowed and scared to be alone, and they had Sky with 100 or so channels. Apart from the BBC channels they seemed amazingly similar (and for my taste amazingly crap) - wall to wall game shows, comedies and sub-Bond action movies.
I used to think that when we had 100 channels there would be a sort of PR, with maybe 50% as above and the rest addressing a range of different audiences. But apparently nearly everyone's going for the Mail/Sun market.
It is the "Conservation of Quality" in effect. There are only so many people that make quality content. When channels proliferate faster than people making quality stuff, the void fills up with cr*p.
Manufacturers have warned that Brexit will add to soaring costs facing British industry, amid concerns that customs delays and red tape will rank among the biggest challenges for firms this year.
Make UK, the industry body representing 20,000 manufacturing firms of all sizes from across the country, said that while optimism among its members had grown, it was being undermined by the after-effects of the UK’s departure from the EU.
One year on from the end of the transition period, two-thirds of industrial company leaders in its survey of 228 firms said Brexit had moderately or significantly hampered their business. More than half of firms warned they were likely to suffer further damage this year from customs delays due to import checks and changes to product labelling.
According to the 2022 MakeUK/PwC senior executive survey, Brexit disruption remains among the biggest concerns facing industry bosses for the year ahead as Britain’s departure from the EU complicates the fallout from Covid-19 and the rising costs facing companies.
Delays at customs, the additional costs from meeting separate regulatory regimes in the UK and the EU, and reduced access to migrant workers were among top concerns raised in the survey.
The British company that bid on the passports put in a ludicrous bid, thinking that because they were British they would win. It was one of those government-contract-will-fill-the-pension-fund-hole-and-pay-c-suite-bonus bids.
I discovered recently that my son's passport is over a year out of date, so he will be the first in our family to enjoy the dubious honour of the new shit passport. Poor kid, utterly failed by the older generation. At least he has an American passport to fall back on.
Errr ... the US passport is as valuable as the UK's, which is as valuable as many other European countries, at least according to this ranking:
However, aesthetically I think the US passport is the best in the world, with images on each page of the great sights of the US - the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and so on. We should do similar in our passport - the Tower of London, Durham Cathedral and so on.
That's bollocks. The ranking you cite is based on visa free holiday travel or short business trips. My son's UK passport used to entitle him to total freedom to live and work in an economy of 400mn odd people. Luckily he still has the opportunity to do that in the US but not via his UK passport. Would be ironic if we put a picture of the Tower of London - symbol of subjugation by an invading continental power - on our French/Polish Brexit passport.
That UK/EU passport also gave 450m EU people the right to live, work, claim benefits, or sell the Big Issue while also claiming benefits, in the UK. So it gave your son rights but it also drove up UK house prices, increased UK homelessness, put intense pressure on UK schools, doctors, etc, and lowered wages for many ordinary UK workers. And it meant non European migrants in mainland EU could simply shift to the UK, about which we could do nothing.
Which puts a somewhat different gloss on the “desirability” of an EU passport
We could deport them after 3 months if they didn't have an income that could sustain them. That we didn't bother and other countries (like Belgium) did is our own fault. And remains how we get around the freedom of movement issues when we rejoin connections to the single market.
I haven’t followed it much but QAnon are pro trump aren’t they? I saw that video pop up and was amused by the uncomfortable facial reactions from left and right ex presidents and family and assumed the letters must have been something like an invite by Donald to drinks round his. But it’s not really the most interesting thing to talk about for so long and spend an entire weekend researching.
Not sure how I’ve wronged but your focus on me is a bit odd.
Didn't spend a whole weekend as IshmaelZ can confirm re private conversation with him which I think started on Friday. Just didn't get around to posting until Sunday. It took seconds to find because doh the link is with the video.
It popped up on a youtube video of someone who was also a QAnon supporter and poster and 5 seconds into the video it was also obvious it was QAnon and all the comments with the video make that clear it is QAnon and the description gives it away also because it says so!. It took me seconds to find the link because it was publicised with the video 'with thank to DemoQracy Fighters'.
And you couldn't see any of that?
How you have wronged is promoting QAnon stuff which is just pure evil and you have a track record unlike anyone else here of conspiracy stuff.
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
I don't see why its not a great look? Until now an LFT positive followed by a PCR negative has been treated as a false positive.
Given that you can very easily fake an LFT positive (I believe Lemonade triggers a positive) I have little faith in its credibility.
If LFTs are causing positives but PCRs aren't finding them then that's a really serious problem that should be getting discussed.
Unless you're deliberately messing up the test, the rate of false positives for LFTs is around one in a thousand.
As far as I'm aware that's not been demonstrated by a self-administered study plus if its possible to get the wrong results by deliberately messing up the test, then we shouldn't rule out getting the wrong results without deliberately doing so.
The high number of LFT positives followed by PCR negatives doesn't fit with the 1/1000 claim that was only made using data from professionally administered tests.
On Djokovic it has just been reported that should the Federal Australian government proceed as rumoured to expel him from Australia, he will be banned from re-entering Australia for 3 years and no doubt cause him problems worldwide
Certainly the USA, and probably many other countries, will ask on their visa application form if you’ve ever been denied entry or deported from any country. Answering in the affirmative is likely to lead to a somewhat extended process at the border, in the best case scenario.
On Djokovic it has just been reported that should the Federal Australian government proceed as rumoured to expel him from Australia, he will be banned from re-entering Australia for 3 years and no doubt cause him problems worldwide
Surely the Australian Government have to accept defeat on this now. They clearly cocked-up. Time to move on.
Of course not, most Australian voters are on the side of the Federal Government not Djokovic and this is an election year
Well that’s the pickle they’ve got themselves into, isn’t it…
When the government is behind in most polls it is not a pickle, arguably instead an ideal opportunity for a poll bounce
Not that this will surprise many people here but Help To Buy was a waste of money and the money should have been directly spent on social housing - a Lord's report says
I know a number of people who bought their first properties through Help to Buy.
Plus while some Tory councils like mine are building more social homes even in 2019 most living in social housing voted Labour. A Tory government will want to create more Tory voters owning their first property not more Labour voters in social housing
Oh I know - they overpaid by about 20% and gave the housebuilders massive unearned profits.
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
I don't see why its not a great look? Until now an LFT positive followed by a PCR negative has been treated as a false positive.
Given that you can very easily fake an LFT positive (I believe Lemonade triggers a positive) I have little faith in its credibility.
If LFTs are causing positives but PCRs aren't finding them then that's a really serious problem that should be getting discussed.
Unless you're deliberately messing up the test, the rate of false positives for LFTs is around one in a thousand.
As far as I'm aware that's not been demonstrated by a self-administered study plus if its possible to get the wrong results by deliberately messing up the test, then we shouldn't rule out getting the wrong results without deliberately doing so.
The high number of LFT positives followed by PCR negatives doesn't fit with the 1/1000 claim that was only made using data from professionally administered tests.
Most lft positives followed by PCR negatives will be PCR false negatives, not lft false positives.
An example, my niece lft tested positive just after christmas. PCR was negative, lft the day after produced a very faint line. Simplest explanation is she had Covid, cleared it very quickly and simply missed the virus when she did her PCR swab.
Mr. Tubbs, given the choice between more NHS staff and them not all being vaccinated or fewer and 100% vaccination I'd be inclined to go for the former.
Policies that decrease the number of doctors and nurses do not seem helpful.
I must say I have doubts about doctors and nurses who oppose modern medical practice on crackpot grounds.
If they're so against vaccination how can they be trusted to not let their beliefs interfere with their work.
Its like having a science teacher that doesn't believe in evolution, or a Police Officer who doesn't follow the law himself, or a politician who doesn't believe in the rule of law.
Some might consider all those to be normal though.
There are some difficulties around this though. As long as said science teacher teaches the kids the facts as expected by the educational board/school etc then its fine.
I don't understand why doctors can be against vaccination, but is this the case, or are some/most of them against covid vaccination? We have had the discussions on PB about how quickly the vaccines were developed and tested. I have no issues with this, but I think some do. Its possible some are not happy about the mRNA component. I believe the possibility that in twenty years we will have an epidemic of XX condition, linked to mRNA vaccines taken in 2021/22 is zero, but that will be a fear for some.
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
I don't see why its not a great look? Until now an LFT positive followed by a PCR negative has been treated as a false positive.
Given that you can very easily fake an LFT positive (I believe Lemonade triggers a positive) I have little faith in its credibility.
If LFTs are causing positives but PCRs aren't finding them then that's a really serious problem that should be getting discussed.
Unless you're deliberately messing up the test, the rate of false positives for LFTs is around one in a thousand.
As documented here at the time, my wife had two positive LFTs on Christmas Day, followed by a negative PCR on Boxing Day. Perhaps recovery from Omicron is much more rapid than from previous variants, especially for the triple jabbed?
On Djokovic it has just been reported that should the Federal Australian government proceed as rumoured to expel him from Australia, he will be banned from re-entering Australia for 3 years and no doubt cause him problems worldwide
Surely the Australian Government have to accept defeat on this now. They clearly cocked-up. Time to move on.
I hope so. It's hard to call though. Domestic politics drove the first decision so it might drive the next one too.
My brother drove me back to London as he had real estate meetings. He is buying a freehold of land thing on peoples homes and flats all over the country, driving to London to buy it in Yorkshire and Lancashire, for just a few thousands of pounds and then offering freehold to home owner for lots of times more than he paid, and like putting in planning to build on the freehold, like on top of block of flats to coerce them to buy it off him.
I told him he is going to jail. He said it’s not illegal, it’s very easy to do and easy money everyone’s doing it.
I told him it’s utterly utterly unethical, will cause nice people so much grief, so it’s bound to be illegal in this country. I told him I disown him, and if I was high up in Church I would excommunicate him but he was in such a cheerful mood he just laughed ☹️
No PB-ers are doing this same thing are they? 🤨
If he's buying flat freehold then its not illegal for him, but the original owners should be offering it to the leaseholders under the right to first refusal legislation. What happens in that situation is anyone's guess (compensation and rubbish and all that).
Thank you. I didn’t realise yesterday about first refusal. I guess those in flat have little idea what’s about to happen when they refuse?
If I can nail him and get him excommunicated from human race on this, I will.
Manufacturers have warned that Brexit will add to soaring costs facing British industry, amid concerns that customs delays and red tape will rank among the biggest challenges for firms this year.
Make UK, the industry body representing 20,000 manufacturing firms of all sizes from across the country, said that while optimism among its members had grown, it was being undermined by the after-effects of the UK’s departure from the EU.
One year on from the end of the transition period, two-thirds of industrial company leaders in its survey of 228 firms said Brexit had moderately or significantly hampered their business. More than half of firms warned they were likely to suffer further damage this year from customs delays due to import checks and changes to product labelling.
According to the 2022 MakeUK/PwC senior executive survey, Brexit disruption remains among the biggest concerns facing industry bosses for the year ahead as Britain’s departure from the EU complicates the fallout from Covid-19 and the rising costs facing companies.
Delays at customs, the additional costs from meeting separate regulatory regimes in the UK and the EU, and reduced access to migrant workers were among top concerns raised in the survey.
The British company that bid on the passports put in a ludicrous bid, thinking that because they were British they would win. It was one of those government-contract-will-fill-the-pension-fund-hole-and-pay-c-suite-bonus bids.
I discovered recently that my son's passport is over a year out of date, so he will be the first in our family to enjoy the dubious honour of the new shit passport. Poor kid, utterly failed by the older generation. At least he has an American passport to fall back on.
Errr ... the US passport is as valuable as the UK's, which is as valuable as many other European countries, at least according to this ranking:
However, aesthetically I think the US passport is the best in the world, with images on each page of the great sights of the US - the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and so on. We should do similar in our passport - the Tower of London, Durham Cathedral and so on.
That's bollocks. The ranking you cite is based on visa free holiday travel or short business trips. My son's UK passport used to entitle him to total freedom to live and work in an economy of 400mn odd people. Luckily he still has the opportunity to do that in the US but not via his UK passport. Would be ironic if we put a picture of the Tower of London - symbol of subjugation by an invading continental power - on our French/Polish Brexit passport.
That UK/EU passport also gave 450m EU people the right to live, work, claim benefits, or sell the Big Issue while also claiming benefits, in the UK. So it gave your son rights but it also drove up UK house prices, increased UK homelessness, put intense pressure on UK schools, doctors, etc, and lowered wages for many ordinary UK workers. And it meant non European migrants in mainland EU could simply shift to the UK, about which we could do nothing.
Which puts a somewhat different gloss on the “desirability” of an EU passport
We could deport them after 3 months if they didn't have an income that could sustain them. That we didn't bother and other countries (like Belgium) did is our own fault. And remains how we get around the freedom of movement issues when we rejoin connections to the single market.
Not that this will surprise many people here but Help To Buy was a waste of money and the money should have been directly spent on social housing - a Lord's report says
I know a number of people who bought their first properties through Help to Buy.
Plus while some Tory councils like mine are building more social homes even in 2019 most living in social housing voted Labour. A Tory government will want to create more Tory voters owning their first property not more Labour voters in social housing
Ignoring the incredible cynicism for a moment,
A major problem with this kind of thinking from the tories, is, well, it’s a bit more complicated.
Property owning =/= tory voting. It’s the asset price inflation bit that creates tory voters.
Stagnant, or declining property values and these people will vote left.
So the tories, not only have to tax working people to shovel cash to first time buyers, they then have to continue to inflate the house price bubble. Eventually, the music stops.
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
I don't see why its not a great look? Until now an LFT positive followed by a PCR negative has been treated as a false positive.
Given that you can very easily fake an LFT positive (I believe Lemonade triggers a positive) I have little faith in its credibility.
If LFTs are causing positives but PCRs aren't finding them then that's a really serious problem that should be getting discussed.
Unless you're deliberately messing up the test, the rate of false positives for LFTs is around one in a thousand.
As far as I'm aware that's not been demonstrated by a self-administered study plus if its possible to get the wrong results by deliberately messing up the test, then we shouldn't rule out getting the wrong results without deliberately doing so.
The high number of LFT positives followed by PCR negatives doesn't fit with the 1/1000 claim that was only made using data from professionally administered tests.
Most lft positives followed by PCR negatives will be PCR false negatives, not lft false positives.
So you claim. And yet LFD devices can very easily give the wrong results, yet you treat them as gospel truth.
Using your Professor Meadows maths the odds of 13 false negatives would be exceptionally slim too.
My brother drove me back to London as he had real estate meetings. He is buying a freehold of land thing on peoples homes and flats all over the country, driving to London to buy it in Yorkshire and Lancashire, for just a few thousands of pounds and then offering freehold to home owner for lots of times more than he paid, and like putting in planning to build on the freehold, like on top of block of flats to coerce them to buy it off him.
I told him he is going to jail. He said it’s not illegal, it’s very easy to do and easy money everyone’s doing it.
I told him it’s utterly utterly unethical, will cause nice people so much grief, so it’s bound to be illegal in this country. I told him I disown him, and if I was high up in Church I would excommunicate him but he was in such a cheerful mood he just laughed ☹️
No PB-ers are doing this same thing are they? 🤨
If he's buying flat freehold then its not illegal for him, but the original owners should be offering it to the leaseholders under the right to first refusal legislation. What happens in that situation is anyone's guess (compensation and rubbish and all that).
Thank you. I didn’t realise yesterday about first refusal. I guess those in flat have little idea what’s about to happen when they refuse?
If I can nail him and get him excommunicated from human race on this, I will.
Get him to apply for a job at Trafigura. He seems to have the required business ethics.
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
I don't see why its not a great look? Until now an LFT positive followed by a PCR negative has been treated as a false positive.
Given that you can very easily fake an LFT positive (I believe Lemonade triggers a positive) I have little faith in its credibility.
If LFTs are causing positives but PCRs aren't finding them then that's a really serious problem that should be getting discussed.
Unless you're deliberately messing up the test, the rate of false positives for LFTs is around one in a thousand.
As far as I'm aware that's not been demonstrated by a self-administered study plus if its possible to get the wrong results by deliberately messing up the test, then we shouldn't rule out getting the wrong results without deliberately doing so.
The high number of LFT positives followed by PCR negatives doesn't fit with the 1/1000 claim that was only made using data from professionally administered tests.
Most lft positives followed by PCR negatives will be PCR false negatives, not lft false positives.
So you claim. And yet LFD devices can very easily give the wrong results, yet you treat them as gospel truth.
Using your Professor Meadows maths the odds of 13 false negatives would be exceptionally slim too.
Mr. Tubbs, given the choice between more NHS staff and them not all being vaccinated or fewer and 100% vaccination I'd be inclined to go for the former.
Policies that decrease the number of doctors and nurses do not seem helpful.
I must say I have doubts about doctors and nurses who oppose modern medical practice on crackpot grounds.
If they're so against vaccination how can they be trusted to not let their beliefs interfere with their work.
Its like having a science teacher that doesn't believe in evolution, or a Police Officer who doesn't follow the law himself, or a politician who doesn't believe in the rule of law.
Some might consider all those to be normal though.
There are some difficulties around this though. As long as said science teacher teaches the kids the facts as expected by the educational board/school etc then its fine.
I don't understand why doctors can be against vaccination, but is this the case, or are some/most of them against covid vaccination? We have had the discussions on PB about how quickly the vaccines were developed and tested. I have no issues with this, but I think some do. Its possible some are not happy about the mRNA component. I believe the possibility that in twenty years we will have an epidemic of XX condition, linked to mRNA vaccines taken in 2021/22 is zero, but that will be a fear for some.
Aren't we all supposed to have died from CJD by now? There were many prognostications of doom about the incubation period of Mad COw Disease in humans
Hypothetical question. Smoke alarms are there not to prevent fire but to prevent death. Fire in house. Alarms allow the safe evacuation of inhabitants.
Will their insurance company refuse to pay out because their functional alarms which worked as intended were not the specific type required by Scotland's new law?
Most insurance policies have a clause about complying with legislation. But that's always so far been about things like building codes (which Grenfell did!). So it's a letter vs spirit of the law question...
Messing around with insurance companies is probably not a smart move in general. If you give them a loophole to get out of paying, or paying less than you expect, then don't be surprised if they take it. It seems that's the assessors job post-incident.
I'm going to get it done because I can. But as 95% of existing smoke alarms are not compliant there will be an awful lot of people who won't be. Because they don't know, can't afford it, or think it's stupid.
So it's back down to how much of a row the insurance industry wants to have up here. Invalidating one person's policy because they had functional smoke alarms that did their job is one thing. If they try and do that to a lot of people, it may be the insurers in trouble.
I suspect that insurance companies will be more reasonable than jobsworth bureaucrats.
Er... Insurance companies are staffed with jobsworth bureaucrats.
According to the new standards I need to fit alarms on either side of my living room door. Which makes total sense really...
Question - is not hearing an alarm somewhere inside a single property really a thing?
Obviously, interconnected systems make sense in blocks of flats. But unless you accidentally live in Edinburgh Castle, is there really a problem with not hearing fire alarms in the kitchen from the bedroom etc?
Every minute counts and if you are upstairs , doors closed there is a very good chance you will not hear immediately. Seconds can make a difference so I would rather be safe than sorry.
Does anyone have details on this Scottish law RP's been mentioning, as it sounds interesting.
We have connected fire alarms on every floor of our townhouse. They're loud, and we can certainly hear them, even with the TV on. But I must admit that I've never actually checked they're audible from every room - but given where they're placed, I'd think they are.
Something to test later.
You have to have RF-interconnected detectors with sealed batteries or mains connection. Smoke in your living room, and any floor's hallway, heat in the kitchen, CO anywhere you have a combustible source like an open fire or boiler. All have to meet a specific new standard - have read that 95% of installed detectors are now incompatible.
What I don't get is that this is post-Grenfell, yet the detectors do not need to be interconnected between flats in a block. Having a fire roaring away in the flat below you and your detectors not connected to theirs is fine. But in a house? You MUST have detectors in practically every sodding room - I would need three in adjoining rooms downstairs because one isn't sufficient despite being deafening.
Linked fire alarms in blocks of flats can end up being a total nightmare for the residents, especially if there’s not always security people on site to investigate. If there’s a couple of hundred units in the block, and every case of burned toast sends a thousand people down a dozen flights of stairs, two or three times a week, then the alarms soon find themselves being ‘decommissioned’ by the residents.
If Boris can steer England through to the end of January with no NHS collapse and declining Omicron cases - and no further restrictions - then OGH will likely win his 3/1 bet (IIRC) on there being at least one Tory poll lead this month
Might also make Drakeford/Sturgeon look a little foolish
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
I don't see why its not a great look? Until now an LFT positive followed by a PCR negative has been treated as a false positive.
Given that you can very easily fake an LFT positive (I believe Lemonade triggers a positive) I have little faith in its credibility.
If LFTs are causing positives but PCRs aren't finding them then that's a really serious problem that should be getting discussed.
Unless you're deliberately messing up the test, the rate of false positives for LFTs is around one in a thousand.
As far as I'm aware that's not been demonstrated by a self-administered study plus if its possible to get the wrong results by deliberately messing up the test, then we shouldn't rule out getting the wrong results without deliberately doing so.
The high number of LFT positives followed by PCR negatives doesn't fit with the 1/1000 claim that was only made using data from professionally administered tests.
Manufacturers have warned that Brexit will add to soaring costs facing British industry, amid concerns that customs delays and red tape will rank among the biggest challenges for firms this year.
Make UK, the industry body representing 20,000 manufacturing firms of all sizes from across the country, said that while optimism among its members had grown, it was being undermined by the after-effects of the UK’s departure from the EU.
One year on from the end of the transition period, two-thirds of industrial company leaders in its survey of 228 firms said Brexit had moderately or significantly hampered their business. More than half of firms warned they were likely to suffer further damage this year from customs delays due to import checks and changes to product labelling.
According to the 2022 MakeUK/PwC senior executive survey, Brexit disruption remains among the biggest concerns facing industry bosses for the year ahead as Britain’s departure from the EU complicates the fallout from Covid-19 and the rising costs facing companies.
Delays at customs, the additional costs from meeting separate regulatory regimes in the UK and the EU, and reduced access to migrant workers were among top concerns raised in the survey.
The British company that bid on the passports put in a ludicrous bid, thinking that because they were British they would win. It was one of those government-contract-will-fill-the-pension-fund-hole-and-pay-c-suite-bonus bids.
I discovered recently that my son's passport is over a year out of date, so he will be the first in our family to enjoy the dubious honour of the new shit passport. Poor kid, utterly failed by the older generation. At least he has an American passport to fall back on.
Errr ... the US passport is as valuable as the UK's, which is as valuable as many other European countries, at least according to this ranking:
However, aesthetically I think the US passport is the best in the world, with images on each page of the great sights of the US - the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and so on. We should do similar in our passport - the Tower of London, Durham Cathedral and so on.
That's bollocks. The ranking you cite is based on visa free holiday travel or short business trips. My son's UK passport used to entitle him to total freedom to live and work in an economy of 400mn odd people. Luckily he still has the opportunity to do that in the US but not via his UK passport. Would be ironic if we put a picture of the Tower of London - symbol of subjugation by an invading continental power - on our French/Polish Brexit passport.
That UK/EU passport also gave 450m EU people the right to live, work, claim benefits, or sell the Big Issue while also claiming benefits, in the UK. So it gave your son rights but it also drove up UK house prices, increased UK homelessness, put intense pressure on UK schools, doctors, etc, and lowered wages for many ordinary UK workers. And it meant non European migrants in mainland EU could simply shift to the UK, about which we could do nothing.
Which puts a somewhat different gloss on the “desirability” of an EU passport
We could deport them after 3 months if they didn't have an income that could sustain them. That we didn't bother and other countries (like Belgium) did is our own fault. And remains how we get around the freedom of movement issues when we rejoin connections to the single market.
Though if they had a job then they were entitled to Housing Support, Tax Credits, Universal Credit, Child Benefits and couldn't be deported.
On Djokovic it has just been reported that should the Federal Australian government proceed as rumoured to expel him from Australia, he will be banned from re-entering Australia for 3 years and no doubt cause him problems worldwide
Surely the Australian Government have to accept defeat on this now. They clearly cocked-up. Time to move on.
I hope so. It's hard to call though. Domestic politics drove the first decision so it might drive the next one too.
As I understand it, the Australian Federal government can kick him out, pretty much at whim.
From what my Australian friends say, this would be approved of by just about everyone there, who isn't an anti-vaxer.
People saying why didn't BBC monetarise their back catalogue....
To some extent they did, they are now 100% owners of UKTV. The problem is they backed the wrong horse, they backed more over the air channels, while the smart money backed streaming.
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
I don't see why its not a great look? Until now an LFT positive followed by a PCR negative has been treated as a false positive.
Given that you can very easily fake an LFT positive (I believe Lemonade triggers a positive) I have little faith in its credibility.
If LFTs are causing positives but PCRs aren't finding them then that's a really serious problem that should be getting discussed.
Unless you're deliberately messing up the test, the rate of false positives for LFTs is around one in a thousand.
As far as I'm aware that's not been demonstrated by a self-administered study plus if its possible to get the wrong results by deliberately messing up the test, then we shouldn't rule out getting the wrong results without deliberately doing so.
The high number of LFT positives followed by PCR negatives doesn't fit with the 1/1000 claim that was only made using data from professionally administered tests.
Most lft positives followed by PCR negatives will be PCR false negatives, not lft false positives.
So you claim. And yet LFD devices can very easily give the wrong results, yet you treat them as gospel truth.
Using your Professor Meadows maths the odds of 13 false negatives would be exceptionally slim too.
The issue is whether they constitute 13 independent Bernouilli trials isn't it?
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
I don't see why its not a great look? Until now an LFT positive followed by a PCR negative has been treated as a false positive.
Given that you can very easily fake an LFT positive (I believe Lemonade triggers a positive) I have little faith in its credibility.
If LFTs are causing positives but PCRs aren't finding them then that's a really serious problem that should be getting discussed.
Unless you're deliberately messing up the test, the rate of false positives for LFTs is around one in a thousand.
As far as I'm aware that's not been demonstrated by a self-administered study plus if its possible to get the wrong results by deliberately messing up the test, then we shouldn't rule out getting the wrong results without deliberately doing so.
The high number of LFT positives followed by PCR negatives doesn't fit with the 1/1000 claim that was only made using data from professionally administered tests.
Most lft positives followed by PCR negatives will be PCR false negatives, not lft false positives.
So you claim. And yet LFD devices can very easily give the wrong results, yet you treat them as gospel truth.
Using your Professor Meadows maths the odds of 13 false negatives would be exceptionally slim too.
PCR sensisitivity is lower than 99.9%.
Given how easy LFD false positives can be faked, so is LFD sensitivity.
Even if a spherical cow in a vacuum has 99.9% sensitivity.
Mr. Tubbs, given the choice between more NHS staff and them not all being vaccinated or fewer and 100% vaccination I'd be inclined to go for the former.
Policies that decrease the number of doctors and nurses do not seem helpful.
I must say I have doubts about doctors and nurses who oppose modern medical practice on crackpot grounds.
If they're so against vaccination how can they be trusted to not let their beliefs interfere with their work.
Its like having a science teacher that doesn't believe in evolution, or a Police Officer who doesn't follow the law himself, or a politician who doesn't believe in the rule of law.
Some might consider all those to be normal though.
Not all opposition to getting vaccinated (especially if you’ve had prior infection) is that scientifically crackpot though, is it?
I can also understand (if not agree) why some sports people (especially again if prior infected) are reluctant to get jabbed - given there are side effects which can be quite disruptive to training schedules etc if at all lingering. This isn’t in general a high risk population. The case for mass vaccination is often a case for, well, mass vaccination - the case isn’t always so clear cut for all individuals. Hell JCVI even said the case was “balanced” for teenagers in general, so it’s hardly a big step to suggest it might be the same for young elite sports people when the decision ultimately remains one for individual choice.
JCVI managed that by using a probable infection rate for children that was ludicrously low.
Strangely, no one seems to have put together the fact that we have quite a few people in the younger groups going into hospital and their vaccination status.
The following is the Case to Admissions ratio for England....
Indeed. I, personally, would strongly disagree with their assumption that only 4% of children would end up exposed to the virus, and even with that assumption, the benefit-to-risk was over 10:1, so I found the statement that it was "balanced" to be quite surprising.
And that was assuming the worst possible case for the risk.
The underlying subtext was "We'd prefer us to send the vaccines we would have used on children away to other countries," which is a perfectly valid argument, just not really the one they should have been considering.
Hypothetical question. Smoke alarms are there not to prevent fire but to prevent death. Fire in house. Alarms allow the safe evacuation of inhabitants.
Will their insurance company refuse to pay out because their functional alarms which worked as intended were not the specific type required by Scotland's new law?
Most insurance policies have a clause about complying with legislation. But that's always so far been about things like building codes (which Grenfell did!). So it's a letter vs spirit of the law question...
Messing around with insurance companies is probably not a smart move in general. If you give them a loophole to get out of paying, or paying less than you expect, then don't be surprised if they take it. It seems that's the assessors job post-incident.
I'm going to get it done because I can. But as 95% of existing smoke alarms are not compliant there will be an awful lot of people who won't be. Because they don't know, can't afford it, or think it's stupid.
So it's back down to how much of a row the insurance industry wants to have up here. Invalidating one person's policy because they had functional smoke alarms that did their job is one thing. If they try and do that to a lot of people, it may be the insurers in trouble.
I suspect that insurance companies will be more reasonable than jobsworth bureaucrats.
Er... Insurance companies are staffed with jobsworth bureaucrats.
According to the new standards I need to fit alarms on either side of my living room door. Which makes total sense really...
Question - is not hearing an alarm somewhere inside a single property really a thing?
Obviously, interconnected systems make sense in blocks of flats. But unless you accidentally live in Edinburgh Castle, is there really a problem with not hearing fire alarms in the kitchen from the bedroom etc?
Every minute counts and if you are upstairs , doors closed there is a very good chance you will not hear immediately. Seconds can make a difference so I would rather be safe than sorry.
My kids have headphones on a lot of the time. Bedroom door shut + headphones on means they wouldn’t hear an alarm if it was only going off in the kitchen with the kitchen door shut.
I made a point of putting in a set of wired in smoke alarms throughout the house when we renovated it: if one goes off they all go off (plus a heat alarm in the kitchen). Plus I read the kids the riot act: if they weren’t at the front door within thirty seconds after an alarm going off then privilieges (i.e. internet access) would be pulled.
Fire is no joke.
Happily my now non-compliant and imminently illegal alarms set off all the Google devices including the phone my son would be listening to music on. Which is why I will be keeping them as my primary system even as and when a set of dumb compliant alarms go in.
Are the Nest ones actually non-compliant though? Does the legislation specify wired together, or are the radio links Nest devices use sufficient?
Non-compliant because Google don't make a separate heat alarm for the kitchen. I believe mine are also non-compliant because replaceable batteries rather than mains, but that's the whole point - if your mains gets knocked out by fire you want an independent power source. They also create their own non-wifi Mesh network so so risk if wifi goes down.
Wired alarms have a battery backup. Used to be standard 9V jobs but these days lithium ones that last years.
Mr. Tubbs, given the choice between more NHS staff and them not all being vaccinated or fewer and 100% vaccination I'd be inclined to go for the former.
Policies that decrease the number of doctors and nurses do not seem helpful.
I must say I have doubts about doctors and nurses who oppose modern medical practice on crackpot grounds.
If they're so against vaccination how can they be trusted to not let their beliefs interfere with their work.
Its like having a science teacher that doesn't believe in evolution, or a Police Officer who doesn't follow the law himself, or a politician who doesn't believe in the rule of law.
Some might consider all those to be normal though.
There are some difficulties around this though. As long as said science teacher teaches the kids the facts as expected by the educational board/school etc then its fine.
I don't understand why doctors can be against vaccination, but is this the case, or are some/most of them against covid vaccination? We have had the discussions on PB about how quickly the vaccines were developed and tested. I have no issues with this, but I think some do. Its possible some are not happy about the mRNA component. I believe the possibility that in twenty years we will have an epidemic of XX condition, linked to mRNA vaccines taken in 2021/22 is zero, but that will be a fear for some.
Aren't we all supposed to have died from CJD by now? There were many prognostications of doom about the incubation period of Mad COw Disease in humans
Well quite. I think I'm still alive, but maybe I'm a zombie.
Hypothetical question. Smoke alarms are there not to prevent fire but to prevent death. Fire in house. Alarms allow the safe evacuation of inhabitants.
Will their insurance company refuse to pay out because their functional alarms which worked as intended were not the specific type required by Scotland's new law?
Most insurance policies have a clause about complying with legislation. But that's always so far been about things like building codes (which Grenfell did!). So it's a letter vs spirit of the law question...
Messing around with insurance companies is probably not a smart move in general. If you give them a loophole to get out of paying, or paying less than you expect, then don't be surprised if they take it. It seems that's the assessors job post-incident.
I'm going to get it done because I can. But as 95% of existing smoke alarms are not compliant there will be an awful lot of people who won't be. Because they don't know, can't afford it, or think it's stupid.
So it's back down to how much of a row the insurance industry wants to have up here. Invalidating one person's policy because they had functional smoke alarms that did their job is one thing. If they try and do that to a lot of people, it may be the insurers in trouble.
I suspect that insurance companies will be more reasonable than jobsworth bureaucrats.
Er... Insurance companies are staffed with jobsworth bureaucrats.
According to the new standards I need to fit alarms on either side of my living room door. Which makes total sense really...
Question - is not hearing an alarm somewhere inside a single property really a thing?
Obviously, interconnected systems make sense in blocks of flats. But unless you accidentally live in Edinburgh Castle, is there really a problem with not hearing fire alarms in the kitchen from the bedroom etc?
Every minute counts and if you are upstairs , doors closed there is a very good chance you will not hear immediately. Seconds can make a difference so I would rather be safe than sorry.
Does anyone have details on this Scottish law RP's been mentioning, as it sounds interesting.
We have connected fire alarms on every floor of our townhouse. They're loud, and we can certainly hear them, even with the TV on. But I must admit that I've never actually checked they're audible from every room - but given where they're placed, I'd think they are.
Hypothetical question. Smoke alarms are there not to prevent fire but to prevent death. Fire in house. Alarms allow the safe evacuation of inhabitants.
Will their insurance company refuse to pay out because their functional alarms which worked as intended were not the specific type required by Scotland's new law?
Most insurance policies have a clause about complying with legislation. But that's always so far been about things like building codes (which Grenfell did!). So it's a letter vs spirit of the law question...
Messing around with insurance companies is probably not a smart move in general. If you give them a loophole to get out of paying, or paying less than you expect, then don't be surprised if they take it. It seems that's the assessors job post-incident.
I'm going to get it done because I can. But as 95% of existing smoke alarms are not compliant there will be an awful lot of people who won't be. Because they don't know, can't afford it, or think it's stupid.
So it's back down to how much of a row the insurance industry wants to have up here. Invalidating one person's policy because they had functional smoke alarms that did their job is one thing. If they try and do that to a lot of people, it may be the insurers in trouble.
I suspect that insurance companies will be more reasonable than jobsworth bureaucrats.
Er... Insurance companies are staffed with jobsworth bureaucrats.
According to the new standards I need to fit alarms on either side of my living room door. Which makes total sense really...
Question - is not hearing an alarm somewhere inside a single property really a thing?
Obviously, interconnected systems make sense in blocks of flats. But unless you accidentally live in Edinburgh Castle, is there really a problem with not hearing fire alarms in the kitchen from the bedroom etc?
Every minute counts and if you are upstairs , doors closed there is a very good chance you will not hear immediately. Seconds can make a difference so I would rather be safe than sorry.
My kids have headphones on a lot of the time. Bedroom door shut + headphones on means they wouldn’t hear an alarm if it was only going off in the kitchen with the kitchen door shut.
I made a point of putting in a set of wired in smoke alarms throughout the house when we renovated it: if one goes off they all go off (plus a heat alarm in the kitchen). Plus I read the kids the riot act: if they weren’t at the front door within thirty seconds after an alarm going off then privilieges (i.e. internet access) would be pulled.
If Boris can steer England through to the end of January with no NHS collapse and declining Omicron cases - and no further restrictions - then OGH will likely win his 3/1 bet (IIRC) on there being at least one Tory poll lead this month
Might also make Drakeford/Sturgeon look a little foolish
But, as always with Covid, 🙏🙏🙏🙏
That is, of course, always assuming there isn't a Govt. cock-up somewhere else! Which, given what's going on overall, seems a distinct possibility!
Mr. Tubbs, given the choice between more NHS staff and them not all being vaccinated or fewer and 100% vaccination I'd be inclined to go for the former.
Policies that decrease the number of doctors and nurses do not seem helpful.
I must say I have doubts about doctors and nurses who oppose modern medical practice on crackpot grounds.
If they're so against vaccination how can they be trusted to not let their beliefs interfere with their work.
Its like having a science teacher that doesn't believe in evolution, or a Police Officer who doesn't follow the law himself, or a politician who doesn't believe in the rule of law.
Some might consider all those to be normal though.
There are some difficulties around this though. As long as said science teacher teaches the kids the facts as expected by the educational board/school etc then its fine.
I don't understand why doctors can be against vaccination, but is this the case, or are some/most of them against covid vaccination? We have had the discussions on PB about how quickly the vaccines were developed and tested. I have no issues with this, but I think some do. Its possible some are not happy about the mRNA component. I believe the possibility that in twenty years we will have an epidemic of XX condition, linked to mRNA vaccines taken in 2021/22 is zero, but that will be a fear for some.
Vaccination among medical staff is higher than in the general population.
The anti-vax comments from medics seem just as un-informed as the ones from the general public.
The upside of the ignorance of science among medics is the that when they go bad, they fuck up.
See the UK Doctors Plot - when a bunch of doctors tried to become members of the Spontaneously Self Exploding Community, they thought that stuffing lots of petrol in a car would make a car bomb. All by itself.
Yes, they failed even Hollywood Bomb Making skills...
This led to the moderately famous incident at Glasgow Airport, where one of them got a bit of a shoeing from a cab drier.
Manufacturers have warned that Brexit will add to soaring costs facing British industry, amid concerns that customs delays and red tape will rank among the biggest challenges for firms this year.
Make UK, the industry body representing 20,000 manufacturing firms of all sizes from across the country, said that while optimism among its members had grown, it was being undermined by the after-effects of the UK’s departure from the EU.
One year on from the end of the transition period, two-thirds of industrial company leaders in its survey of 228 firms said Brexit had moderately or significantly hampered their business. More than half of firms warned they were likely to suffer further damage this year from customs delays due to import checks and changes to product labelling.
According to the 2022 MakeUK/PwC senior executive survey, Brexit disruption remains among the biggest concerns facing industry bosses for the year ahead as Britain’s departure from the EU complicates the fallout from Covid-19 and the rising costs facing companies.
Delays at customs, the additional costs from meeting separate regulatory regimes in the UK and the EU, and reduced access to migrant workers were among top concerns raised in the survey.
The British company that bid on the passports put in a ludicrous bid, thinking that because they were British they would win. It was one of those government-contract-will-fill-the-pension-fund-hole-and-pay-c-suite-bonus bids.
I discovered recently that my son's passport is over a year out of date, so he will be the first in our family to enjoy the dubious honour of the new shit passport. Poor kid, utterly failed by the older generation. At least he has an American passport to fall back on.
Errr ... the US passport is as valuable as the UK's, which is as valuable as many other European countries, at least according to this ranking:
However, aesthetically I think the US passport is the best in the world, with images on each page of the great sights of the US - the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and so on. We should do similar in our passport - the Tower of London, Durham Cathedral and so on.
That's bollocks. The ranking you cite is based on visa free holiday travel or short business trips. My son's UK passport used to entitle him to total freedom to live and work in an economy of 400mn odd people. Luckily he still has the opportunity to do that in the US but not via his UK passport. Would be ironic if we put a picture of the Tower of London - symbol of subjugation by an invading continental power - on our French/Polish Brexit passport.
That UK/EU passport also gave 450m EU people the right to live, work, claim benefits, or sell the Big Issue while also claiming benefits, in the UK. So it gave your son rights but it also drove up UK house prices, increased UK homelessness, put intense pressure on UK schools, doctors, etc, and lowered wages for many ordinary UK workers. And it meant non European migrants in mainland EU could simply shift to the UK, about which we could do nothing.
Which puts a somewhat different gloss on the “desirability” of an EU passport
Freedom of movement didn't give people the right to claim benefits and sell the big issue, at least not if the UK govt had been capable of enforcing the rules. It also provided a supply of doctors and teachers so the net effect on public services of leaving is likely negative. And our ability to control the flow of non-EU migrants post Brexit doesn't seem to have improved. Brexit is a busted flush, promoted by charlatans, believed in by the gullible, for which my son's generation will pay the price. It amazes me that a seemingly highly intelligent man like you can still believe in it.
I haven’t followed it much but QAnon are pro trump aren’t they? I saw that video pop up and was amused by the uncomfortable facial reactions from left and right ex presidents and family and assumed the letters must have been something like an invite by Donald to drinks round his. But it’s not really the most interesting thing to talk about for so long and spend an entire weekend researching.
Not sure how I’ve wronged but your focus on me is a bit odd.
Didn't spend a whole weekend as IshmaelZ can confirm re private conversation with him which I think started on Friday. Just didn't get around to posting until Sunday. It took seconds to find because doh the link is with the video.
It popped up on a youtube video of someone who was also a QAnon supporter and poster and 5 seconds into the video it was also obvious it was QAnon and all the comments with the video make that clear it is QAnon and the description gives it away also because it says so!. It took me seconds to find the link because it was publicised with the video 'with thank to DemoQracy Fighters'.
And you couldn't see any of that?
How you have wronged is promoting QAnon stuff which is just pure evil and you have a track record unlike anyone else here of conspiracy stuff.
Well done Sherlock. I have finally been outed as someone that prefers human babies on my pizza (wasn’t that the QAnon thing?).
Must crack on but I shall be sure to come back later to post more “pure evil” as part of my devious plot to undermine the souls of the pb community.
If Boris can steer England through to the end of January with no NHS collapse and declining Omicron cases - and no further restrictions - then OGH will likely win his 3/1 bet (IIRC) on there being at least one Tory poll lead this month
Might also make Drakeford/Sturgeon look a little foolish
But, as always with Covid, 🙏🙏🙏🙏
Not sure Boris can repair his personal reputation though....even if there was a load of scandals all ready to blow up again at any moment.
Manufacturers have warned that Brexit will add to soaring costs facing British industry, amid concerns that customs delays and red tape will rank among the biggest challenges for firms this year.
Make UK, the industry body representing 20,000 manufacturing firms of all sizes from across the country, said that while optimism among its members had grown, it was being undermined by the after-effects of the UK’s departure from the EU.
One year on from the end of the transition period, two-thirds of industrial company leaders in its survey of 228 firms said Brexit had moderately or significantly hampered their business. More than half of firms warned they were likely to suffer further damage this year from customs delays due to import checks and changes to product labelling.
According to the 2022 MakeUK/PwC senior executive survey, Brexit disruption remains among the biggest concerns facing industry bosses for the year ahead as Britain’s departure from the EU complicates the fallout from Covid-19 and the rising costs facing companies.
Delays at customs, the additional costs from meeting separate regulatory regimes in the UK and the EU, and reduced access to migrant workers were among top concerns raised in the survey.
The British company that bid on the passports put in a ludicrous bid, thinking that because they were British they would win. It was one of those government-contract-will-fill-the-pension-fund-hole-and-pay-c-suite-bonus bids.
I discovered recently that my son's passport is over a year out of date, so he will be the first in our family to enjoy the dubious honour of the new shit passport. Poor kid, utterly failed by the older generation. At least he has an American passport to fall back on.
Errr ... the US passport is as valuable as the UK's, which is as valuable as many other European countries, at least according to this ranking:
However, aesthetically I think the US passport is the best in the world, with images on each page of the great sights of the US - the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and so on. We should do similar in our passport - the Tower of London, Durham Cathedral and so on.
That's bollocks. The ranking you cite is based on visa free holiday travel or short business trips. My son's UK passport used to entitle him to total freedom to live and work in an economy of 400mn odd people. Luckily he still has the opportunity to do that in the US but not via his UK passport. Would be ironic if we put a picture of the Tower of London - symbol of subjugation by an invading continental power - on our French/Polish Brexit passport.
That UK/EU passport also gave 450m EU people the right to live, work, claim benefits, or sell the Big Issue while also claiming benefits, in the UK. So it gave your son rights but it also drove up UK house prices, increased UK homelessness, put intense pressure on UK schools, doctors, etc, and lowered wages for many ordinary UK workers. And it meant non European migrants in mainland EU could simply shift to the UK, about which we could do nothing.
Which puts a somewhat different gloss on the “desirability” of an EU passport
We could deport them after 3 months if they didn't have an income that could sustain them. That we didn't bother and other countries (like Belgium) did is our own fault. And remains how we get around the freedom of movement issues when we rejoin connections to the single market.
On Djokovic it has just been reported that should the Federal Australian government proceed as rumoured to expel him from Australia, he will be banned from re-entering Australia for 3 years and no doubt cause him problems worldwide
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
I don't see why its not a great look? Until now an LFT positive followed by a PCR negative has been treated as a false positive.
Given that you can very easily fake an LFT positive (I believe Lemonade triggers a positive) I have little faith in its credibility.
If LFTs are causing positives but PCRs aren't finding them then that's a really serious problem that should be getting discussed.
Unless you're deliberately messing up the test, the rate of false positives for LFTs is around one in a thousand.
As far as I'm aware that's not been demonstrated by a self-administered study plus if its possible to get the wrong results by deliberately messing up the test, then we shouldn't rule out getting the wrong results without deliberately doing so.
The high number of LFT positives followed by PCR negatives doesn't fit with the 1/1000 claim that was only made using data from professionally administered tests.
Rapid testing in these locations uses the supervised testing model. Supervised testing is where the individual being tested swabs themselves under supervision of a trained operator, and the trained operator processes the test and reads the result.
'We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn't play.
'The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest were false positives.'
He obviously doesn't mean false positives, but not a great look for him to be talking about such things.
I don't see why its not a great look? Until now an LFT positive followed by a PCR negative has been treated as a false positive.
Given that you can very easily fake an LFT positive (I believe Lemonade triggers a positive) I have little faith in its credibility.
If LFTs are causing positives but PCRs aren't finding them then that's a really serious problem that should be getting discussed.
Unless you're deliberately messing up the test, the rate of false positives for LFTs is around one in a thousand.
As far as I'm aware that's not been demonstrated by a self-administered study plus if its possible to get the wrong results by deliberately messing up the test, then we shouldn't rule out getting the wrong results without deliberately doing so.
The high number of LFT positives followed by PCR negatives doesn't fit with the 1/1000 claim that was only made using data from professionally administered tests.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/968095/lateral-flow-device-specificity-in-phase-4.pdf ...Furthermore, we analysed data from NHS Test and Trace ATSs using LFDs from 20 November 2020 to 27 January 2021; 1,700,972 LFDs were performed and 38,270 (2.2%) were reported as positive. Among positive LFD results, 25,779 (67%) were matched to a PCR test within the subsequent 5 days; 24,147 (93.7%) were reported as SARS-CoV-2 PCR positive, significantly higher than the predicted value of 87.2% expected from an LFD specificity of 99.72% (p<0.001...</i>
Hypothetical question. Smoke alarms are there not to prevent fire but to prevent death. Fire in house. Alarms allow the safe evacuation of inhabitants.
Will their insurance company refuse to pay out because their functional alarms which worked as intended were not the specific type required by Scotland's new law?
Most insurance policies have a clause about complying with legislation. But that's always so far been about things like building codes (which Grenfell did!). So it's a letter vs spirit of the law question...
Messing around with insurance companies is probably not a smart move in general. If you give them a loophole to get out of paying, or paying less than you expect, then don't be surprised if they take it. It seems that's the assessors job post-incident.
I'm going to get it done because I can. But as 95% of existing smoke alarms are not compliant there will be an awful lot of people who won't be. Because they don't know, can't afford it, or think it's stupid.
So it's back down to how much of a row the insurance industry wants to have up here. Invalidating one person's policy because they had functional smoke alarms that did their job is one thing. If they try and do that to a lot of people, it may be the insurers in trouble.
I suspect that insurance companies will be more reasonable than jobsworth bureaucrats.
Er... Insurance companies are staffed with jobsworth bureaucrats.
According to the new standards I need to fit alarms on either side of my living room door. Which makes total sense really...
Question - is not hearing an alarm somewhere inside a single property really a thing?
Obviously, interconnected systems make sense in blocks of flats. But unless you accidentally live in Edinburgh Castle, is there really a problem with not hearing fire alarms in the kitchen from the bedroom etc?
Every minute counts and if you are upstairs , doors closed there is a very good chance you will not hear immediately. Seconds can make a difference so I would rather be safe than sorry.
Does anyone have details on this Scottish law RP's been mentioning, as it sounds interesting.
We have connected fire alarms on every floor of our townhouse. They're loud, and we can certainly hear them, even with the TV on. But I must admit that I've never actually checked they're audible from every room - but given where they're placed, I'd think they are.
Something to test later.
You have to have RF-interconnected detectors with sealed batteries or mains connection. Smoke in your living room, and any floor's hallway, heat in the kitchen, CO anywhere you have a combustible source like an open fire or boiler. All have to meet a specific new standard - have read that 95% of installed detectors are now incompatible.
What I don't get is that this is post-Grenfell, yet the detectors do not need to be interconnected between flats in a block. Having a fire roaring away in the flat below you and your detectors not connected to theirs is fine. But in a house? You MUST have detectors in practically every sodding room - I would need three in adjoining rooms downstairs because one isn't sufficient despite being deafening.
Thanks. We wouldn't meet that requirement if it came in in England.
Seems like a licence for some companies to print money.
Will only become an issue if you are selling your house or doing building work. It is very sensible though.
On Djokovic it has just been reported that should the Federal Australian government proceed as rumoured to expel him from Australia, he will be banned from re-entering Australia for 3 years and no doubt cause him problems worldwide
Surely the Australian Government have to accept defeat on this now. They clearly cocked-up. Time to move on.
I hope so. It's hard to call though. Domestic politics drove the first decision so it might drive the next one too.
As I understand it, the Australian Federal government can kick him out, pretty much at whim.
From what my Australian friends say, this would be approved of by just about everyone there, who isn't an anti-vaxer.
“Can” and “should” (given they seem to have created the situation which could have been avoided in the first place) are two different things though.
You can say that Djok has himself to “blame” for not getting vaccinated, but basically if he’s been encouraged to travel to Australia in belief that he would not be deported, and then is, and that then causes him ongoing difficulties in future (including barring him from future participation in Australia for three years) then at the very least he’s strong grounds for complaint on grounds of natural justice.
Mr. Tubbs, given the choice between more NHS staff and them not all being vaccinated or fewer and 100% vaccination I'd be inclined to go for the former.
Policies that decrease the number of doctors and nurses do not seem helpful.
I must say I have doubts about doctors and nurses who oppose modern medical practice on crackpot grounds.
If they're so against vaccination how can they be trusted to not let their beliefs interfere with their work.
Its like having a science teacher that doesn't believe in evolution, or a Police Officer who doesn't follow the law himself, or a politician who doesn't believe in the rule of law.
Some might consider all those to be normal though.
Not all opposition to getting vaccinated (especially if you’ve had prior infection) is that scientifically crackpot though, is it?
I can also understand (if not agree) why some sports people (especially again if prior infected) are reluctant to get jabbed - given there are side effects which can be quite disruptive to training schedules etc if at all lingering. This isn’t in general a high risk population. The case for mass vaccination is often a case for, well, mass vaccination - the case isn’t always so clear cut for all individuals. Hell JCVI even said the case was “balanced” for teenagers in general, so it’s hardly a big step to suggest it might be the same for young elite sports people when the decision ultimately remains one for individual choice.
JCVI managed that by using a probable infection rate for children that was ludicrously low.
Strangely, no one seems to have put together the fact that we have quite a few people in the younger groups going into hospital and their vaccination status.
The following is the Case to Admissions ratio for England....
Indeed. I, personally, would strongly disagree with their assumption that only 4% of children would end up exposed to the virus, and even with that assumption, the benefit-to-risk was over 10:1, so I found the statement that it was "balanced" to be quite surprising.
And that was assuming the worst possible case for the risk.
The underlying subtext was "We'd prefer us to send the vaccines we would have used on children away to other countries," which is a perfectly valid argument, just not really the one they should have been considering.
The ass-umption* that only 4% of children would be infected by COVID was a reasonable one - for someone mixing Crack Cocaine with their PCP, while on mushrooms.
Five minutes browsing a parents group on WhatsApp for any given school, regarding the rates of infection among children would have suggested that number was insane. Let alone looking at actual... data?
Manufacturers have warned that Brexit will add to soaring costs facing British industry, amid concerns that customs delays and red tape will rank among the biggest challenges for firms this year.
Make UK, the industry body representing 20,000 manufacturing firms of all sizes from across the country, said that while optimism among its members had grown, it was being undermined by the after-effects of the UK’s departure from the EU.
One year on from the end of the transition period, two-thirds of industrial company leaders in its survey of 228 firms said Brexit had moderately or significantly hampered their business. More than half of firms warned they were likely to suffer further damage this year from customs delays due to import checks and changes to product labelling.
According to the 2022 MakeUK/PwC senior executive survey, Brexit disruption remains among the biggest concerns facing industry bosses for the year ahead as Britain’s departure from the EU complicates the fallout from Covid-19 and the rising costs facing companies.
Delays at customs, the additional costs from meeting separate regulatory regimes in the UK and the EU, and reduced access to migrant workers were among top concerns raised in the survey.
The British company that bid on the passports put in a ludicrous bid, thinking that because they were British they would win. It was one of those government-contract-will-fill-the-pension-fund-hole-and-pay-c-suite-bonus bids.
I discovered recently that my son's passport is over a year out of date, so he will be the first in our family to enjoy the dubious honour of the new shit passport. Poor kid, utterly failed by the older generation. At least he has an American passport to fall back on.
Errr ... the US passport is as valuable as the UK's, which is as valuable as many other European countries, at least according to this ranking:
However, aesthetically I think the US passport is the best in the world, with images on each page of the great sights of the US - the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and so on. We should do similar in our passport - the Tower of London, Durham Cathedral and so on.
That's bollocks. The ranking you cite is based on visa free holiday travel or short business trips. My son's UK passport used to entitle him to total freedom to live and work in an economy of 400mn odd people. Luckily he still has the opportunity to do that in the US but not via his UK passport. Would be ironic if we put a picture of the Tower of London - symbol of subjugation by an invading continental power - on our French/Polish Brexit passport.
That UK/EU passport also gave 450m EU people the right to live, work, claim benefits, or sell the Big Issue while also claiming benefits, in the UK. So it gave your son rights but it also drove up UK house prices, increased UK homelessness, put intense pressure on UK schools, doctors, etc, and lowered wages for many ordinary UK workers. And it meant non European migrants in mainland EU could simply shift to the UK, about which we could do nothing.
Which puts a somewhat different gloss on the “desirability” of an EU passport
We could deport them after 3 months if they didn't have an income that could sustain them. That we didn't bother and other countries (like Belgium) did is our own fault. And remains how we get around the freedom of movement issues when we rejoin connections to the single market.
A 16 hour minimum wage job plus some combination of Housing Allowance, Universal Credit, Tax Credits, Child Benefits etc etc would meet that requirement though.
Yes we could have abolished universal welfare but no party was willing to do so.
People saying why didn't BBC monetarise their back catalogue....
To some extent they did, they are now 100% owners of UKTV. The problem is they backed the wrong horse, they backed more over the air channels, while the smart money backed streaming.
Again wrong - they backed the correct horse at the time.
Streaming arrived later by which point Osbourne and co were in power and the BBC were constrained from going all in on streaming...
Sweeties for OAP Tory voters was way more important than international expansion.
Manufacturers have warned that Brexit will add to soaring costs facing British industry, amid concerns that customs delays and red tape will rank among the biggest challenges for firms this year.
Make UK, the industry body representing 20,000 manufacturing firms of all sizes from across the country, said that while optimism among its members had grown, it was being undermined by the after-effects of the UK’s departure from the EU.
One year on from the end of the transition period, two-thirds of industrial company leaders in its survey of 228 firms said Brexit had moderately or significantly hampered their business. More than half of firms warned they were likely to suffer further damage this year from customs delays due to import checks and changes to product labelling.
According to the 2022 MakeUK/PwC senior executive survey, Brexit disruption remains among the biggest concerns facing industry bosses for the year ahead as Britain’s departure from the EU complicates the fallout from Covid-19 and the rising costs facing companies.
Delays at customs, the additional costs from meeting separate regulatory regimes in the UK and the EU, and reduced access to migrant workers were among top concerns raised in the survey.
The British company that bid on the passports put in a ludicrous bid, thinking that because they were British they would win. It was one of those government-contract-will-fill-the-pension-fund-hole-and-pay-c-suite-bonus bids.
I discovered recently that my son's passport is over a year out of date, so he will be the first in our family to enjoy the dubious honour of the new shit passport. Poor kid, utterly failed by the older generation. At least he has an American passport to fall back on.
Errr ... the US passport is as valuable as the UK's, which is as valuable as many other European countries, at least according to this ranking:
However, aesthetically I think the US passport is the best in the world, with images on each page of the great sights of the US - the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and so on. We should do similar in our passport - the Tower of London, Durham Cathedral and so on.
That's bollocks. The ranking you cite is based on visa free holiday travel or short business trips. My son's UK passport used to entitle him to total freedom to live and work in an economy of 400mn odd people. Luckily he still has the opportunity to do that in the US but not via his UK passport. Would be ironic if we put a picture of the Tower of London - symbol of subjugation by an invading continental power - on our French/Polish Brexit passport.
That UK/EU passport also gave 450m EU people the right to live, work, claim benefits, or sell the Big Issue while also claiming benefits, in the UK. So it gave your son rights but it also drove up UK house prices, increased UK homelessness, put intense pressure on UK schools, doctors, etc, and lowered wages for many ordinary UK workers. And it meant non European migrants in mainland EU could simply shift to the UK, about which we could do nothing.
Which puts a somewhat different gloss on the “desirability” of an EU passport
We could deport them after 3 months if they didn't have an income that could sustain them. That we didn't bother and other countries (like Belgium) did is our own fault. And remains how we get around the freedom of movement issues when we rejoin connections to the single market.
But the definitions were vague. IIRC Cameron lost an ECJ ruling on this crucial point. I can’t be arsed to spend 20 minutes seeking the deets. Might do it later
People saying why didn't BBC monetarise their back catalogue....
To some extent they did, they are now 100% owners of UKTV. The problem is they backed the wrong horse, they backed more over the air channels, while the smart money backed streaming.
That was doctrinal - going to streaming would have strengthened the case for encryption. And the BBC fought a very hard battle to prevent encryption replacing the licence fee legal comedy.
Interesting write-up in The Grocer on the Public Accounts Committee's report on the CAP-replacement Environmental Land Management program.
Summary? The scheme 'lacks detail and is based on “blind optimism”.' The plan will cut in half direct subsidy payments by 24/25 which the committee notes the risk that smaller and tenant farmers "who are operating on wafer-thin margins will go out of business"
' “We have known we were replacing the CAP since 2016 and still we see no clear plans, objectives or communications with those at the sharp end – farmers – in this multi-billion pound, radical overhaul of the way land is used and, more crucially, food is produced in this country,” said committee chair and veteran Tory MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton Brown.'
What an absolute fiasco. As with the customs SNAFU the government are all talk and no action. Whilst the Welsh Nationalist from Essex always says "we have delivered farmers from CAP as they wanted" that wasn't supposed to be the end game. Leaving the EU is the first step - what you do afterwards is critical.
Simple point - we either make farms economically viable or we're back to being massively reliant on imported food. Which is the reverse of what Brexit proclaimed and is strategically stupid. That the government don't know what to do, and think "cut subsidies in half" will work is lunacy.
The Tories had farmers and fishermen as a client vote for a while. Who will they vote for in 2024? Won't be Tory if dogma and incompetence threaten their industry and way of life.
It's up to the consumers, finally. If they want to pay more for UK-produced agricultural goods (if domestic produce turns out to be more expensive) then everyone is happy. If not, then the consumers will be happy but not some farmers.
Speaking to my man on the combine over the weekend he seems to think that the Australian deal is a red herring because over the course of its 10-year term growig demand from China will mean that nothing produced in Australia will ever leave Asia. As for the environmental scheme he believes that the benefits will accrue to large landowners which may present a problem for the government politically.
When we were in Australia (ok it was 4 years ago) many of the Australians we spoke to were worried about the growing influence of China on their agriculture. It may be that they are trying to be less dependent on China.
Not that this will surprise many people here but Help To Buy was a waste of money and the money should have been directly spent on social housing - a Lord's report says
I know a number of people who bought their first properties through Help to Buy.
Plus while some Tory councils like mine are building more social homes even in 2019 most living in social housing voted Labour. A Tory government will want to create more Tory voters owning their first property not more Labour voters in social housing
Ignoring the incredible cynicism for a moment,
A major problem with this kind of thinking from the tories, is, well, it’s a bit more complicated.
Property owning =/= tory voting. It’s the asset price inflation bit that creates tory voters.
Stagnant, or declining property values and these people will vote left.
So the tories, not only have to tax working people to shovel cash to first time buyers, they then have to continue to inflate the house price bubble. Eventually, the music stops.
That is not true, home owners always vote Tory, even in 1997, regardless of their house price. Those renting in social homes always vote Labour, even in 2019
Even those owning only with a mortgage are swing voters not always Labour voters, voting Labour in 1997 but Tory in 2019
If Boris can steer England through to the end of January with no NHS collapse and declining Omicron cases - and no further restrictions - then OGH will likely win his 3/1 bet (IIRC) on there being at least one Tory poll lead this month
Might also make Drakeford/Sturgeon look a little foolish
But, as always with Covid, 🙏🙏🙏🙏
That is, of course, always assuming there isn't a Govt. cock-up somewhere else! Which, given what's going on overall, seems a distinct possibility!
So far, the government have unwound the plunge which happened when Christmas looked wobbly. That's the relatively easy bit. The next batches of voters to win back- the ones lost because of Paterson and Peppa Pig- will be trickier.
Though if the real gap is four percent, a +2/-2 not-quite-outlier zaps that lead, which is definitely possible.
People saying why didn't BBC monetarise their back catalogue....
To some extent they did, they are now 100% owners of UKTV. The problem is they backed the wrong horse, they backed more over the air channels, while the smart money backed streaming.
Again wrong - they backed the correct horse at the time.
Streaming arrived later by which point Osbourne and co were in power and the BBC were constrained from going all in on streaming...
Sweeties for OAP Tory voters was way more important than international expansion.
Hold on, no, the BBC only recently went all in on UKTV, rather than the opposite. They are lumbering themselves with a network of extra tv channels in an era when nobody should be doing that.
People saying why didn't BBC monetarise their back catalogue....
To some extent they did, they are now 100% owners of UKTV. The problem is they backed the wrong horse, they backed more over the air channels, while the smart money backed streaming.
Again wrong - they backed the correct horse at the time.
Streaming arrived later by which point Osbourne and co were in power and the BBC were constrained from going all in on streaming...
Sweeties for OAP Tory voters was way more important than international expansion.
Nice try, they backed the wrong horse. Netflix backed streaming while Osborne was still on the Opposition benches.
Mr. Tubbs, given the choice between more NHS staff and them not all being vaccinated or fewer and 100% vaccination I'd be inclined to go for the former.
Policies that decrease the number of doctors and nurses do not seem helpful.
I must say I have doubts about doctors and nurses who oppose modern medical practice on crackpot grounds.
If they're so against vaccination how can they be trusted to not let their beliefs interfere with their work.
Its like having a science teacher that doesn't believe in evolution, or a Police Officer who doesn't follow the law himself, or a politician who doesn't believe in the rule of law.
Some might consider all those to be normal though.
There are some difficulties around this though. As long as said science teacher teaches the kids the facts as expected by the educational board/school etc then its fine.
I don't understand why doctors can be against vaccination, but is this the case, or are some/most of them against covid vaccination? We have had the discussions on PB about how quickly the vaccines were developed and tested. I have no issues with this, but I think some do. Its possible some are not happy about the mRNA component. I believe the possibility that in twenty years we will have an epidemic of XX condition, linked to mRNA vaccines taken in 2021/22 is zero, but that will be a fear for some.
Vaccination among medical staff is higher than in the general population.
The anti-vax comments from medics seem just as un-informed as the ones from the general public.
The upside of the ignorance of science among medics is the that when they go bad, they fuck up.
See the UK Doctors Plot - when a bunch of doctors tried to become members of the Spontaneously Self Exploding Community, they thought that stuffing lots of petrol in a car would make a car bomb. All by itself.
Yes, they failed even Hollywood Bomb Making skills...
This led to the moderately famous incident at Glasgow Airport, where one of them got a bit of a shoeing from a cab drier.
Given that doctors are supposed to have a decent background in chemistry, and every A-level chemistry student 25 years ago had a copy of The Anarchist’s Handbookobtained from one source or another, it’s quite astonishing that a doctor seemingly had no idea how to cause an actual explosion, let alone a Hollywood firebomb.
On Djokovic it has just been reported that should the Federal Australian government proceed as rumoured to expel him from Australia, he will be banned from re-entering Australia for 3 years and no doubt cause him problems worldwide
Surely the Australian Government have to accept defeat on this now. They clearly cocked-up. Time to move on.
I hope so. It's hard to call though. Domestic politics drove the first decision so it might drive the next one too.
As I understand it, the Australian Federal government can kick him out, pretty much at whim.
From what my Australian friends say, this would be approved of by just about everyone there, who isn't an anti-vaxer.
That's what I mean. They already look bad on the 'competence & fairness' metric so they might think 'in for a penny in for a pound' to at least get the result they want and the political boost they seek. The alternative is look bad *and* fail. Worst of both worlds. So they might do it. They might still kick him out. On balance I think not but it wouldn't shock me.
Hypothetical question. Smoke alarms are there not to prevent fire but to prevent death. Fire in house. Alarms allow the safe evacuation of inhabitants.
Will their insurance company refuse to pay out because their functional alarms which worked as intended were not the specific type required by Scotland's new law?
Most insurance policies have a clause about complying with legislation. But that's always so far been about things like building codes (which Grenfell did!). So it's a letter vs spirit of the law question...
Messing around with insurance companies is probably not a smart move in general. If you give them a loophole to get out of paying, or paying less than you expect, then don't be surprised if they take it. It seems that's the assessors job post-incident.
I'm going to get it done because I can. But as 95% of existing smoke alarms are not compliant there will be an awful lot of people who won't be. Because they don't know, can't afford it, or think it's stupid.
So it's back down to how much of a row the insurance industry wants to have up here. Invalidating one person's policy because they had functional smoke alarms that did their job is one thing. If they try and do that to a lot of people, it may be the insurers in trouble.
I suspect that insurance companies will be more reasonable than jobsworth bureaucrats.
Er... Insurance companies are staffed with jobsworth bureaucrats.
According to the new standards I need to fit alarms on either side of my living room door. Which makes total sense really...
Question - is not hearing an alarm somewhere inside a single property really a thing?
Obviously, interconnected systems make sense in blocks of flats. But unless you accidentally live in Edinburgh Castle, is there really a problem with not hearing fire alarms in the kitchen from the bedroom etc?
Every minute counts and if you are upstairs , doors closed there is a very good chance you will not hear immediately. Seconds can make a difference so I would rather be safe than sorry.
My kids have headphones on a lot of the time. Bedroom door shut + headphones on means they wouldn’t hear an alarm if it was only going off in the kitchen with the kitchen door shut.
I made a point of putting in a set of wired in smoke alarms throughout the house when we renovated it: if one goes off they all go off (plus a heat alarm in the kitchen). Plus I read the kids the riot act: if they weren’t at the front door within thirty seconds after an alarm going off then privilieges (i.e. internet access) would be pulled.
Fire is no joke.
Happily my now non-compliant and imminently illegal alarms set off all the Google devices including the phone my son would be listening to music on. Which is why I will be keeping them as my primary system even as and when a set of dumb compliant alarms go in.
Are the Nest ones actually non-compliant though? Does the legislation specify wired together, or are the radio links Nest devices use sufficient?
Non-compliant because Google don't make a separate heat alarm for the kitchen. I believe mine are also non-compliant because replaceable batteries rather than mains, but that's the whole point - if your mains gets knocked out by fire you want an independent power source. They also create their own non-wifi Mesh network so so risk if wifi goes down.
They can have sealed batteries, the ones that have 10 year life, so not mandatory to be mains, RF connected is mandatory.
Mr. Tubbs, given the choice between more NHS staff and them not all being vaccinated or fewer and 100% vaccination I'd be inclined to go for the former.
Policies that decrease the number of doctors and nurses do not seem helpful.
I must say I have doubts about doctors and nurses who oppose modern medical practice on crackpot grounds.
If they're so against vaccination how can they be trusted to not let their beliefs interfere with their work.
Its like having a science teacher that doesn't believe in evolution, or a Police Officer who doesn't follow the law himself, or a politician who doesn't believe in the rule of law.
Some might consider all those to be normal though.
There are some difficulties around this though. As long as said science teacher teaches the kids the facts as expected by the educational board/school etc then its fine.
I don't understand why doctors can be against vaccination, but is this the case, or are some/most of them against covid vaccination? We have had the discussions on PB about how quickly the vaccines were developed and tested. I have no issues with this, but I think some do. Its possible some are not happy about the mRNA component. I believe the possibility that in twenty years we will have an epidemic of XX condition, linked to mRNA vaccines taken in 2021/22 is zero, but that will be a fear for some.
Vaccination among medical staff is higher than in the general population.
The anti-vax comments from medics seem just as un-informed as the ones from the general public.
The upside of the ignorance of science among medics is the that when they go bad, they fuck up.
See the UK Doctors Plot - when a bunch of doctors tried to become members of the Spontaneously Self Exploding Community, they thought that stuffing lots of petrol in a car would make a car bomb. All by itself.
Yes, they failed even Hollywood Bomb Making skills...
This led to the moderately famous incident at Glasgow Airport, where one of them got a bit of a shoeing from a cab drier.
Tangentially question. I watched an old Midsomer Murders the other day that featured an oxygen rich room for treatment. The denoument involved the perp flooding the chamber with oxygen, then lighting a cigaretter lighter, which 'caused' a huge explosion.
I think this was poor science. Fire (and explosion, which is just very fast fire) needs three things. 1.Oxygen (or a source of oxygen) 2. Fuel 3. Ignition source.
In the story two of the components were present (ignition and oxygen) but no obvious fuel, at least not one that would explode.
Is my thinking right, or would a very high oxygen atmosphere be able to cause an explosion in those circumstances?
If Boris can steer England through to the end of January with no NHS collapse and declining Omicron cases - and no further restrictions - then OGH will likely win his 3/1 bet (IIRC) on there being at least one Tory poll lead this month
Might also make Drakeford/Sturgeon look a little foolish
But, as always with Covid, 🙏🙏🙏🙏
If things go quiet for a few months and the cost of living leaps in Spring are muted, then I could see the Tory share climbing back up to be on level pegging or even a tiny bit ahead of Labour. The two things that have shifted since a few months ago though are the small but sustained increased in Lib Dem VI (bad for Tories) and a small decline in Green (good for Labour), plus possibly enough of an uptick in SNP to cost the Tories a few close seats in Scotland especially if unionist tactical voting unwinds.
The impact of all of this, plus what looks like a falling out with Boris in the North, could mean the Labour vote becomes a little less inefficient than it might have been.
I haven’t followed it much but QAnon are pro trump aren’t they? I saw that video pop up and was amused by the uncomfortable facial reactions from left and right ex presidents and family and assumed the letters must have been something like an invite by Donald to drinks round his. But it’s not really the most interesting thing to talk about for so long and spend an entire weekend researching.
Not sure how I’ve wronged but your focus on me is a bit odd.
Didn't spend a whole weekend as IshmaelZ can confirm re private conversation with him which I think started on Friday. Just didn't get around to posting until Sunday. It took seconds to find because doh the link is with the video.
It popped up on a youtube video of someone who was also a QAnon supporter and poster and 5 seconds into the video it was also obvious it was QAnon and all the comments with the video make that clear it is QAnon and the description gives it away also because it says so!. It took me seconds to find the link because it was publicised with the video 'with thank to DemoQracy Fighters'.
And you couldn't see any of that?
How you have wronged is promoting QAnon stuff which is just pure evil and you have a track record unlike anyone else here of conspiracy stuff.
Well done Sherlock. I have finally been outed as someone that prefers human babies on my pizza (wasn’t that the QAnon thing?).
Must crack on but I shall be sure to come back later to post more “pure evil” as part of my devious plot to undermine the souls of the pb community.
Your video came from the source that did exactly that. There is a video on Pizzagate. You just come across all this crap by chance do you, because until your link I had never seen that youtube poster or that web site?
What are we supposed to think about someone who accesses this sort of stuff.
Hypothetical question. Smoke alarms are there not to prevent fire but to prevent death. Fire in house. Alarms allow the safe evacuation of inhabitants.
Will their insurance company refuse to pay out because their functional alarms which worked as intended were not the specific type required by Scotland's new law?
Most insurance policies have a clause about complying with legislation. But that's always so far been about things like building codes (which Grenfell did!). So it's a letter vs spirit of the law question...
Messing around with insurance companies is probably not a smart move in general. If you give them a loophole to get out of paying, or paying less than you expect, then don't be surprised if they take it. It seems that's the assessors job post-incident.
I'm going to get it done because I can. But as 95% of existing smoke alarms are not compliant there will be an awful lot of people who won't be. Because they don't know, can't afford it, or think it's stupid.
So it's back down to how much of a row the insurance industry wants to have up here. Invalidating one person's policy because they had functional smoke alarms that did their job is one thing. If they try and do that to a lot of people, it may be the insurers in trouble.
I suspect that insurance companies will be more reasonable than jobsworth bureaucrats.
Er... Insurance companies are staffed with jobsworth bureaucrats.
According to the new standards I need to fit alarms on either side of my living room door. Which makes total sense really...
Question - is not hearing an alarm somewhere inside a single property really a thing?
Obviously, interconnected systems make sense in blocks of flats. But unless you accidentally live in Edinburgh Castle, is there really a problem with not hearing fire alarms in the kitchen from the bedroom etc?
Every minute counts and if you are upstairs , doors closed there is a very good chance you will not hear immediately. Seconds can make a difference so I would rather be safe than sorry.
My kids have headphones on a lot of the time. Bedroom door shut + headphones on means they wouldn’t hear an alarm if it was only going off in the kitchen with the kitchen door shut.
I made a point of putting in a set of wired in smoke alarms throughout the house when we renovated it: if one goes off they all go off (plus a heat alarm in the kitchen). Plus I read the kids the riot act: if they weren’t at the front door within thirty seconds after an alarm going off then privilieges (i.e. internet access) would be pulled.
Fire is no joke.
Happily my now non-compliant and imminently illegal alarms set off all the Google devices including the phone my son would be listening to music on. Which is why I will be keeping them as my primary system even as and when a set of dumb compliant alarms go in.
Are the Nest ones actually non-compliant though? Does the legislation specify wired together, or are the radio links Nest devices use sufficient?
Non-compliant because Google don't make a separate heat alarm for the kitchen. I believe mine are also non-compliant because replaceable batteries rather than mains, but that's the whole point - if your mains gets knocked out by fire you want an independent power source. They also create their own non-wifi Mesh network so so risk if wifi goes down.
Wired alarms have a battery backup. Used to be standard 9V jobs but these days lithium ones that last years.
Yes and they do run out and you need to replace the unit, I changed one recently in my flat, 10 year life span supposedly.
Mr. Pioneers, makes it all the more remarkable that decades of pro-EU governments didn't actually enforce that or shift benefits to being just for citizens/long term residents.
Not that this will surprise many people here but Help To Buy was a waste of money and the money should have been directly spent on social housing - a Lord's report says
I know a number of people who bought their first properties through Help to Buy.
Plus while some Tory councils like mine are building more social homes even in 2019 most living in social housing voted Labour. A Tory government will want to create more Tory voters owning their first property not more Labour voters in social housing
Ignoring the incredible cynicism for a moment,
A major problem with this kind of thinking from the tories, is, well, it’s a bit more complicated.
Property owning =/= tory voting. It’s the asset price inflation bit that creates tory voters.
Stagnant, or declining property values and these people will vote left.
So the tories, not only have to tax working people to shovel cash to first time buyers, they then have to continue to inflate the house price bubble. Eventually, the music stops.
That is not true, home owners always vote Tory, even in 1997, regardless of their house price. Those renting in social homes always vote Labour, even in 2019
Even those owning only with a mortgage are swing voters not always Labour voters, voting Labour in 1997 but Tory in 2019
My dear chap, you do sometimes let yourself get run away with. For example, I was a home-owner, albeit with some assistance from a mortgage company, from 1963-2003, and never voted Tory. Further, since retiring I've owned outright and still don't, and wouldn't, vote for 'your lot'. Further, I know quite a few home-owners who see things as I do.
On Djokovic it has just been reported that should the Federal Australian government proceed as rumoured to expel him from Australia, he will be banned from re-entering Australia for 3 years and no doubt cause him problems worldwide
Surely the Australian Government have to accept defeat on this now. They clearly cocked-up. Time to move on.
I hope so. It's hard to call though. Domestic politics drove the first decision so it might drive the next one too.
As I understand it, the Australian Federal government can kick him out, pretty much at whim.
From what my Australian friends say, this would be approved of by just about everyone there, who isn't an anti-vaxer.
“Can” and “should” (given they seem to have created the situation which could have been avoided in the first place) are two different things though.
You can say that Djok has himself to “blame” for not getting vaccinated, but basically if he’s been encouraged to travel to Australia in belief that he would not be deported, and then is, and that then causes him ongoing difficulties in future (including barring him from future participation in Australia for three years) then at the very least he’s strong grounds for complaint on grounds of natural justice.
I think Felix down thread said this is most difficult for lefties? My mum loves farage, love Djokovic, being rightwinger Conservative loves Morrison loves his stance on coal and jobs versus green wokists. I’d say it’s an odd one to make left-right point scoring.
HY said it’s going well for electioneering Morrison. I think maybe up to the point the judge didn’t back them, it’s now getting messy. And messy isn’t a good look for a government, it looks like Tennis Australia and federal government were not on same page to nip it in bud before it became an issue, ideally that would have been best thing for the government?
Mr. Tubbs, given the choice between more NHS staff and them not all being vaccinated or fewer and 100% vaccination I'd be inclined to go for the former.
Policies that decrease the number of doctors and nurses do not seem helpful.
I must say I have doubts about doctors and nurses who oppose modern medical practice on crackpot grounds.
If they're so against vaccination how can they be trusted to not let their beliefs interfere with their work.
Its like having a science teacher that doesn't believe in evolution, or a Police Officer who doesn't follow the law himself, or a politician who doesn't believe in the rule of law.
Some might consider all those to be normal though.
The argument for firing them should be that they are unsafe to others, not that they hold beliefs which you don't like or don't seem logical to you.
If their beliefs are interfering with their work, then they can be fired on those grounds.
Manufacturers have warned that Brexit will add to soaring costs facing British industry, amid concerns that customs delays and red tape will rank among the biggest challenges for firms this year.
Make UK, the industry body representing 20,000 manufacturing firms of all sizes from across the country, said that while optimism among its members had grown, it was being undermined by the after-effects of the UK’s departure from the EU.
One year on from the end of the transition period, two-thirds of industrial company leaders in its survey of 228 firms said Brexit had moderately or significantly hampered their business. More than half of firms warned they were likely to suffer further damage this year from customs delays due to import checks and changes to product labelling.
According to the 2022 MakeUK/PwC senior executive survey, Brexit disruption remains among the biggest concerns facing industry bosses for the year ahead as Britain’s departure from the EU complicates the fallout from Covid-19 and the rising costs facing companies.
Delays at customs, the additional costs from meeting separate regulatory regimes in the UK and the EU, and reduced access to migrant workers were among top concerns raised in the survey.
The British company that bid on the passports put in a ludicrous bid, thinking that because they were British they would win. It was one of those government-contract-will-fill-the-pension-fund-hole-and-pay-c-suite-bonus bids.
I discovered recently that my son's passport is over a year out of date, so he will be the first in our family to enjoy the dubious honour of the new shit passport. Poor kid, utterly failed by the older generation. At least he has an American passport to fall back on.
Errr ... the US passport is as valuable as the UK's, which is as valuable as many other European countries, at least according to this ranking:
However, aesthetically I think the US passport is the best in the world, with images on each page of the great sights of the US - the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and so on. We should do similar in our passport - the Tower of London, Durham Cathedral and so on.
That's bollocks. The ranking you cite is based on visa free holiday travel or short business trips. My son's UK passport used to entitle him to total freedom to live and work in an economy of 400mn odd people. Luckily he still has the opportunity to do that in the US but not via his UK passport. Would be ironic if we put a picture of the Tower of London - symbol of subjugation by an invading continental power - on our French/Polish Brexit passport.
That UK/EU passport also gave 450m EU people the right to live, work, claim benefits, or sell the Big Issue while also claiming benefits, in the UK. So it gave your son rights but it also drove up UK house prices, increased UK homelessness, put intense pressure on UK schools, doctors, etc, and lowered wages for many ordinary UK workers. And it meant non European migrants in mainland EU could simply shift to the UK, about which we could do nothing.
Which puts a somewhat different gloss on the “desirability” of an EU passport
We could deport them after 3 months if they didn't have an income that could sustain them. That we didn't bother and other countries (like Belgium) did is our own fault. And remains how we get around the freedom of movement issues when we rejoin connections to the single market.
But the definitions were vague. IIRC Cameron lost an ECJ ruling on this crucial point. I can’t be arsed to spend 20 minutes seeking the deets. Might do it later
Although not exactly what you were referring to, this case from when we were still bound by EU law seems to confirm what you said.
People saying why didn't BBC monetarise their back catalogue....
To some extent they did, they are now 100% owners of UKTV. The problem is they backed the wrong horse, they backed more over the air channels, while the smart money backed streaming.
Again wrong - they backed the correct horse at the time.
Streaming arrived later by which point Osbourne and co were in power and the BBC were constrained from going all in on streaming...
Sweeties for OAP Tory voters was way more important than international expansion.
Nice try, they backed the wrong horse. Netflix backed streaming while Osborne was still on the Opposition benches.
You also have to look at our broadband speeds and various other options.
IPlayer kicked off on December 25th 2007 but it was only circa 2010 that it became obvious what Netflix's business model was.
You are looking at streaming, what is really important is when did it become clear that it was possible to produce content and sell it across the world with little extra effort and that really is from 2010 onwards...
Heck let's look at the other player within the streaming market
Hypothetical question. Smoke alarms are there not to prevent fire but to prevent death. Fire in house. Alarms allow the safe evacuation of inhabitants.
Will their insurance company refuse to pay out because their functional alarms which worked as intended were not the specific type required by Scotland's new law?
Most insurance policies have a clause about complying with legislation. But that's always so far been about things like building codes (which Grenfell did!). So it's a letter vs spirit of the law question...
Messing around with insurance companies is probably not a smart move in general. If you give them a loophole to get out of paying, or paying less than you expect, then don't be surprised if they take it. It seems that's the assessors job post-incident.
I'm going to get it done because I can. But as 95% of existing smoke alarms are not compliant there will be an awful lot of people who won't be. Because they don't know, can't afford it, or think it's stupid.
So it's back down to how much of a row the insurance industry wants to have up here. Invalidating one person's policy because they had functional smoke alarms that did their job is one thing. If they try and do that to a lot of people, it may be the insurers in trouble.
I suspect that insurance companies will be more reasonable than jobsworth bureaucrats.
Er... Insurance companies are staffed with jobsworth bureaucrats.
According to the new standards I need to fit alarms on either side of my living room door. Which makes total sense really...
Question - is not hearing an alarm somewhere inside a single property really a thing?
Obviously, interconnected systems make sense in blocks of flats. But unless you accidentally live in Edinburgh Castle, is there really a problem with not hearing fire alarms in the kitchen from the bedroom etc?
Every minute counts and if you are upstairs , doors closed there is a very good chance you will not hear immediately. Seconds can make a difference so I would rather be safe than sorry.
Does anyone have details on this Scottish law RP's been mentioning, as it sounds interesting.
We have connected fire alarms on every floor of our townhouse. They're loud, and we can certainly hear them, even with the TV on. But I must admit that I've never actually checked they're audible from every room - but given where they're placed, I'd think they are.
Something to test later.
You have to have RF-interconnected detectors with sealed batteries or mains connection. Smoke in your living room, and any floor's hallway, heat in the kitchen, CO anywhere you have a combustible source like an open fire or boiler. All have to meet a specific new standard - have read that 95% of installed detectors are now incompatible.
What I don't get is that this is post-Grenfell, yet the detectors do not need to be interconnected between flats in a block. Having a fire roaring away in the flat below you and your detectors not connected to theirs is fine. But in a house? You MUST have detectors in practically every sodding room - I would need three in adjoining rooms downstairs because one isn't sufficient despite being deafening.
Thanks. We wouldn't meet that requirement if it came in in England.
Seems like a licence for some companies to print money.
Will only become an issue if you are selling your house or doing building work. It is very sensible though.
A fire detection system in blocks of flats with a hard wired detectors in each flat wired to each other flat (via a central panel) should be mandatory for *all* flats. No exceptions for conversions etc.
This is what the Chinese are going at the World’s Fair, ongoing in my part of the world at the moment. Must be more than a hundred drones and a couple of dozen moving searchlights. https://youtube.com/watch?v=2ypMewDmIQw
I am not sure why you are so amazed by that? Isn't that exactly the same thing that was used for the London New Year fireworks? The super bowl used it for their half time show last year (or maybe it was the year before).
Manufacturers have warned that Brexit will add to soaring costs facing British industry, amid concerns that customs delays and red tape will rank among the biggest challenges for firms this year.
Make UK, the industry body representing 20,000 manufacturing firms of all sizes from across the country, said that while optimism among its members had grown, it was being undermined by the after-effects of the UK’s departure from the EU.
One year on from the end of the transition period, two-thirds of industrial company leaders in its survey of 228 firms said Brexit had moderately or significantly hampered their business. More than half of firms warned they were likely to suffer further damage this year from customs delays due to import checks and changes to product labelling.
According to the 2022 MakeUK/PwC senior executive survey, Brexit disruption remains among the biggest concerns facing industry bosses for the year ahead as Britain’s departure from the EU complicates the fallout from Covid-19 and the rising costs facing companies.
Delays at customs, the additional costs from meeting separate regulatory regimes in the UK and the EU, and reduced access to migrant workers were among top concerns raised in the survey.
The British company that bid on the passports put in a ludicrous bid, thinking that because they were British they would win. It was one of those government-contract-will-fill-the-pension-fund-hole-and-pay-c-suite-bonus bids.
I discovered recently that my son's passport is over a year out of date, so he will be the first in our family to enjoy the dubious honour of the new shit passport. Poor kid, utterly failed by the older generation. At least he has an American passport to fall back on.
Errr ... the US passport is as valuable as the UK's, which is as valuable as many other European countries, at least according to this ranking:
However, aesthetically I think the US passport is the best in the world, with images on each page of the great sights of the US - the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and so on. We should do similar in our passport - the Tower of London, Durham Cathedral and so on.
That's bollocks. The ranking you cite is based on visa free holiday travel or short business trips. My son's UK passport used to entitle him to total freedom to live and work in an economy of 400mn odd people. Luckily he still has the opportunity to do that in the US but not via his UK passport. Would be ironic if we put a picture of the Tower of London - symbol of subjugation by an invading continental power - on our French/Polish Brexit passport.
That UK/EU passport also gave 450m EU people the right to live, work, claim benefits, or sell the Big Issue while also claiming benefits, in the UK. So it gave your son rights but it also drove up UK house prices, increased UK homelessness, put intense pressure on UK schools, doctors, etc, and lowered wages for many ordinary UK workers. And it meant non European migrants in mainland EU could simply shift to the UK, about which we could do nothing.
Which puts a somewhat different gloss on the “desirability” of an EU passport
We could deport them after 3 months if they didn't have an income that could sustain them. That we didn't bother and other countries (like Belgium) did is our own fault. And remains how we get around the freedom of movement issues when we rejoin connections to the single market.
Though if they had a job then they were entitled to Housing Support, Tax Credits, Universal Credit, Child Benefits and couldn't be deported.
Sure - its the right to live and work elsewhere. If you have a job then you're ok. It has never been the case that people could move from Romania to the UK and simply sponge off the state
Manufacturers have warned that Brexit will add to soaring costs facing British industry, amid concerns that customs delays and red tape will rank among the biggest challenges for firms this year.
Make UK, the industry body representing 20,000 manufacturing firms of all sizes from across the country, said that while optimism among its members had grown, it was being undermined by the after-effects of the UK’s departure from the EU.
One year on from the end of the transition period, two-thirds of industrial company leaders in its survey of 228 firms said Brexit had moderately or significantly hampered their business. More than half of firms warned they were likely to suffer further damage this year from customs delays due to import checks and changes to product labelling.
According to the 2022 MakeUK/PwC senior executive survey, Brexit disruption remains among the biggest concerns facing industry bosses for the year ahead as Britain’s departure from the EU complicates the fallout from Covid-19 and the rising costs facing companies.
Delays at customs, the additional costs from meeting separate regulatory regimes in the UK and the EU, and reduced access to migrant workers were among top concerns raised in the survey.
The British company that bid on the passports put in a ludicrous bid, thinking that because they were British they would win. It was one of those government-contract-will-fill-the-pension-fund-hole-and-pay-c-suite-bonus bids.
I discovered recently that my son's passport is over a year out of date, so he will be the first in our family to enjoy the dubious honour of the new shit passport. Poor kid, utterly failed by the older generation. At least he has an American passport to fall back on.
Errr ... the US passport is as valuable as the UK's, which is as valuable as many other European countries, at least according to this ranking:
However, aesthetically I think the US passport is the best in the world, with images on each page of the great sights of the US - the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and so on. We should do similar in our passport - the Tower of London, Durham Cathedral and so on.
That's bollocks. The ranking you cite is based on visa free holiday travel or short business trips. My son's UK passport used to entitle him to total freedom to live and work in an economy of 400mn odd people. Luckily he still has the opportunity to do that in the US but not via his UK passport. Would be ironic if we put a picture of the Tower of London - symbol of subjugation by an invading continental power - on our French/Polish Brexit passport.
That UK/EU passport also gave 450m EU people the right to live, work, claim benefits, or sell the Big Issue while also claiming benefits, in the UK. So it gave your son rights but it also drove up UK house prices, increased UK homelessness, put intense pressure on UK schools, doctors, etc, and lowered wages for many ordinary UK workers. And it meant non European migrants in mainland EU could simply shift to the UK, about which we could do nothing.
Which puts a somewhat different gloss on the “desirability” of an EU passport
We could deport them after 3 months if they didn't have an income that could sustain them. That we didn't bother and other countries (like Belgium) did is our own fault. And remains how we get around the freedom of movement issues when we rejoin connections to the single market.
But the definitions were vague. IIRC Cameron lost an ECJ ruling on this crucial point. I can’t be arsed to spend 20 minutes seeking the deets. Might do it later
Probably not worth your while if you can flog more articles to the Speccie which rewrite your posts on here
Point was that as and when we accept our complete alignment with the single market we won't actually need to open the floodgates to Romanian beggers or whoever the current bogey group is.
This is what the Chinese are going at the World’s Fair, ongoing in my part of the world at the moment. Must be more than a hundred drones and a couple of dozen moving searchlights. https://youtube.com/watch?v=2ypMewDmIQw
Did you see the drone show in the London New Year fireworks?
It's a thing you can order from various specilist companies, off the shelf, now.
I am not sure why you are so amazed by that? Isn't that exactly the same thing that was used for the London New Year fireworks? The super bowl used it for their half time show last year (or maybe it was the year before).
Wasn't the big opening for such drone displays the one at the Tokyo Olympics?
Hypothetical question. Smoke alarms are there not to prevent fire but to prevent death. Fire in house. Alarms allow the safe evacuation of inhabitants.
Will their insurance company refuse to pay out because their functional alarms which worked as intended were not the specific type required by Scotland's new law?
Most insurance policies have a clause about complying with legislation. But that's always so far been about things like building codes (which Grenfell did!). So it's a letter vs spirit of the law question...
Messing around with insurance companies is probably not a smart move in general. If you give them a loophole to get out of paying, or paying less than you expect, then don't be surprised if they take it. It seems that's the assessors job post-incident.
I'm going to get it done because I can. But as 95% of existing smoke alarms are not compliant there will be an awful lot of people who won't be. Because they don't know, can't afford it, or think it's stupid.
So it's back down to how much of a row the insurance industry wants to have up here. Invalidating one person's policy because they had functional smoke alarms that did their job is one thing. If they try and do that to a lot of people, it may be the insurers in trouble.
I suspect that insurance companies will be more reasonable than jobsworth bureaucrats.
Er... Insurance companies are staffed with jobsworth bureaucrats.
According to the new standards I need to fit alarms on either side of my living room door. Which makes total sense really...
Question - is not hearing an alarm somewhere inside a single property really a thing?
Obviously, interconnected systems make sense in blocks of flats. But unless you accidentally live in Edinburgh Castle, is there really a problem with not hearing fire alarms in the kitchen from the bedroom etc?
Every minute counts and if you are upstairs , doors closed there is a very good chance you will not hear immediately. Seconds can make a difference so I would rather be safe than sorry.
My kids have headphones on a lot of the time. Bedroom door shut + headphones on means they wouldn’t hear an alarm if it was only going off in the kitchen with the kitchen door shut.
I made a point of putting in a set of wired in smoke alarms throughout the house when we renovated it: if one goes off they all go off (plus a heat alarm in the kitchen). Plus I read the kids the riot act: if they weren’t at the front door within thirty seconds after an alarm going off then privilieges (i.e. internet access) would be pulled.
Fire is no joke.
Happily my now non-compliant and imminently illegal alarms set off all the Google devices including the phone my son would be listening to music on. Which is why I will be keeping them as my primary system even as and when a set of dumb compliant alarms go in.
Are the Nest ones actually non-compliant though? Does the legislation specify wired together, or are the radio links Nest devices use sufficient?
Non-compliant because Google don't make a separate heat alarm for the kitchen. I believe mine are also non-compliant because replaceable batteries rather than mains, but that's the whole point - if your mains gets knocked out by fire you want an independent power source. They also create their own non-wifi Mesh network so so risk if wifi goes down.
They can have sealed batteries, the ones that have 10 year life, so not mandatory to be mains, RF connected is mandatory.
That they have doled out only a tiny fraction of the grants needed to bring 35k of the poorest households up to code is a major problem. Fire safety is important - but the policy is daft and the implementation is worse.
That trashy BBC Only Way is Essex in Dubai showed them change a drone show with just a few hours notice due to the death of a high ranking member of the ruling family. Seemed like it was a standard programmable kit
It looks like the 2 or three per cent uptick for the Tories I was wondering about from being less pro-restrictions a few weeks ago.
Covid looks to be receding as an issue for the future now though, and the low 'thirties to Labour's 37 is still pretty bad for the Tories. It's near to the worst case scenario, and the bottom end of expectations for the end of the year post-sleaze for the Tories, that I mentioned around the Patterson time.
If Boris can steer England through to the end of January with no NHS collapse and declining Omicron cases - and no further restrictions - then OGH will likely win his 3/1 bet (IIRC) on there being at least one Tory poll lead this month
Might also make Drakeford/Sturgeon look a little foolish
But, as always with Covid, 🙏🙏🙏🙏
If things go quiet for a few months and the cost of living leaps in Spring are muted, then I could see the Tory share climbing back up to be on level pegging or even a tiny bit ahead of Labour. The two things that have shifted since a few months ago though are the small but sustained increased in Lib Dem VI (bad for Tories) and a small decline in Green (good for Labour), plus possibly enough of an uptick in SNP to cost the Tories a few close seats in Scotland especially if unionist tactical voting unwinds.
The impact of all of this, plus what looks like a falling out with Boris in the North, could mean the Labour vote becomes a little less inefficient than it might have been.
FT and other business media now saying the INFLATION BOMB is unlikely to be a thing at all, very short lived if anything.
Like I said yesterday, there’s two scientific ways of looking at it. Both are right, just question of degree and weighting. Sure governments been double digit behind mid terms come back to win, and you have (no need to name them) PBers trawling over polls and sub samples for upticks to support that argument. But on the other hand, can’t remember ant and Dec and darts sing song or everyone in country calling Cameron lazy liar bastard I hate him, for example, so I am sure makes this different.
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Which puts a somewhat different gloss on the “desirability” of an EU passport
They will surely have to abandon “zero Covid”. Lockdowns against Omicron just don’t work, long term
Strangely, no one seems to have put together the fact that we have quite a few people in the younger groups going into hospital and their vaccination status.
The following is the Case to Admissions ratio for England....
Plus while some Tory councils like mine are building more social homes even in 2019 most living in social housing voted Labour. A Tory government will want to create more Tory voters owning their first property not more Labour voters in social housing
TV, it would seem, abhors a vacuum...
It popped up on a youtube video of someone who was also a QAnon supporter and poster and 5 seconds into the video it was also obvious it was QAnon and all the comments with the video make that clear it is QAnon and the description gives it away also because it says so!. It took me seconds to find the link because it was publicised with the video 'with thank to DemoQracy Fighters'.
And you couldn't see any of that?
How you have wronged is promoting QAnon stuff which is just pure evil and you have a track record unlike anyone else here of conspiracy stuff.
The Premier League has told clubs there will no longer be a requirement for twice-weekly PCR Covid-19 testing.
From Thursday [6 January] clubs will conduct daily lateral flow tests.
Tests will be carried out the day before matches and on all training days, with PCR tests only taken to confirm a positive lateral flow result.
So those Liverpool false positives were PCR tests, though interesting that they are going back to LFTs.
The high number of LFT positives followed by PCR negatives doesn't fit with the 1/1000 claim that was only made using data from professionally administered tests.
That they're still doing PCR tests to confirm an LFD result would match the Liverpool story were 13 cases weren't confirmed.
An example, my niece lft tested positive just after christmas. PCR was negative, lft the day after produced a very faint line. Simplest explanation is she had Covid, cleared it very quickly and simply missed the virus when she did her PCR swab.
Labour 283
Conservatives 274
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=Y&CON=33&LAB=37&LIB=10&Reform=5&Green=6&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=18.3&SCOTLAB=20.2&SCOTLIB=6.6&SCOTReform=0.9&SCOTGreen=3&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=48&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2019nbbase
I don't understand why doctors can be against vaccination, but is this the case, or are some/most of them against covid vaccination? We have had the discussions on PB about how quickly the vaccines were developed and tested. I have no issues with this, but I think some do. Its possible some are not happy about the mRNA component. I believe the possibility that in twenty years we will have an epidemic of XX condition, linked to mRNA vaccines taken in 2021/22 is zero, but that will be a fear for some.
If I can nail him and get him excommunicated from human race on this, I will.
A major problem with this kind of thinking from the tories, is, well, it’s a bit more complicated.
Property owning =/= tory voting. It’s the asset price inflation bit that creates tory voters.
Stagnant, or declining property values and these people will vote left.
So the tories, not only have to tax working people to shovel cash to first time buyers, they then have to continue to inflate the house price bubble. Eventually, the music stops.
Using your Professor Meadows maths the odds of 13 false negatives would be exceptionally slim too.
If Boris can steer England through to the end of January with no NHS collapse and declining Omicron cases - and no further restrictions - then OGH will likely win his 3/1 bet (IIRC) on there being at least one Tory poll lead this month
Might also make Drakeford/Sturgeon look a little foolish
But, as always with Covid, 🙏🙏🙏🙏
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-analysis-of-lateral-flow-tests-shows-specificity-of-at-least-999
From what my Australian friends say, this would be approved of by just about everyone there, who isn't an anti-vaxer.
To some extent they did, they are now 100% owners of UKTV. The problem is they backed the wrong horse, they backed more over the air channels, while the smart money backed streaming.
Even if a spherical cow in a vacuum has 99.9% sensitivity.
I, personally, would strongly disagree with their assumption that only 4% of children would end up exposed to the virus, and even with that assumption, the benefit-to-risk was over 10:1, so I found the statement that it was "balanced" to be quite surprising.
And that was assuming the worst possible case for the risk.
The underlying subtext was "We'd prefer us to send the vaccines we would have used on children away to other countries," which is a perfectly valid argument, just not really the one they should have been considering.
The anti-vax comments from medics seem just as un-informed as the ones from the general public.
The upside of the ignorance of science among medics is the that when they go bad, they fuck up.
See the UK Doctors Plot - when a bunch of doctors tried to become members of the Spontaneously Self Exploding Community, they thought that stuffing lots of petrol in a car would make a car bomb. All by itself.
Yes, they failed even Hollywood Bomb Making skills...
This led to the moderately famous incident at Glasgow Airport, where one of them got a bit of a shoeing from a cab drier.
Brexit is a busted flush, promoted by charlatans, believed in by the gullible, for which my son's generation will pay the price. It amazes me that a seemingly highly intelligent man like you can still believe in it.
Must crack on but I shall be sure to come back later to post more “pure evil” as part of my devious plot to undermine the souls of the pb community.
Spherical cow in a vacuum.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/968095/lateral-flow-device-specificity-in-phase-4.pdf
...Furthermore, we analysed data from NHS Test and Trace ATSs using LFDs from 20 November 2020 to 27 January 2021; 1,700,972 LFDs were performed and 38,270 (2.2%) were reported as positive. Among positive LFD results, 25,779 (67%) were matched to a PCR test within the subsequent 5 days; 24,147 (93.7%) were reported as SARS-CoV-2 PCR positive, significantly higher than the predicted value of 87.2% expected from an LFD specificity of 99.72% (p<0.001...</i>
You can say that Djok has himself to “blame” for not getting vaccinated, but basically if he’s been encouraged to travel to Australia in belief that he would not be deported, and then is, and that then causes him ongoing difficulties in future (including barring him from future participation in Australia for three years) then at the very least he’s strong grounds for complaint on grounds of natural justice.
Five minutes browsing a parents group on WhatsApp for any given school, regarding the rates of infection among children would have suggested that number was insane. Let alone looking at actual... data?
*Assumption makes an Ass out of you and Umption
Yes we could have abolished universal welfare but no party was willing to do so.
Streaming arrived later by which point Osbourne and co were in power and the BBC were constrained from going all in on streaming...
Sweeties for OAP Tory voters was way more important than international expansion.
Even those owning only with a mortgage are swing voters not always Labour voters, voting Labour in 1997 but Tory in 2019
Though if the real gap is four percent, a +2/-2 not-quite-outlier zaps that lead, which is definitely possible.
https://twitter.com/shenzhencity/status/1479710924441276416?s=21
I think this was poor science. Fire (and explosion, which is just very fast fire) needs three things.
1.Oxygen (or a source of oxygen)
2. Fuel
3. Ignition source.
In the story two of the components were present (ignition and oxygen) but no obvious fuel, at least not one that would explode.
Is my thinking right, or would a very high oxygen atmosphere be able to cause an explosion in those circumstances?
The impact of all of this, plus what looks like a falling out with Boris in the North, could mean the Labour vote becomes a little less inefficient than it might have been.
What are we supposed to think about someone who accesses this sort of stuff.
Further, I know quite a few home-owners who see things as I do.
HY said it’s going well for electioneering Morrison. I think maybe up to the point the judge didn’t back them, it’s now getting messy. And messy isn’t a good look for a government, it looks like Tennis Australia and federal government were not on same page to nip it in bud before it became an issue, ideally that would have been best thing for the government?
If their beliefs are interfering with their work, then they can be fired on those grounds.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/homeless-eu-citizens-deporting-illegal-policy-home-office-high-court-ruling-brexit-stop-a8110001.html
IPlayer kicked off on December 25th 2007 but it was only circa 2010 that it became obvious what Netflix's business model was.
You are looking at streaming, what is really important is when did it become clear that it was possible to produce content and sell it across the world with little extra effort and that really is from 2010 onwards...
Heck let's look at the other player within the streaming market
Disney+ only started in November 2019.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2ypMewDmIQw
Lol. As if you don't know.
Point was that as and when we accept our complete alignment with the single market we won't actually need to open the floodgates to Romanian beggers or whoever the current bogey group is.
It's a thing you can order from various specilist companies, off the shelf, now.
Covid looks to be receding as an issue for the future now though, and the low 'thirties to Labour's 37 is still pretty bad for the Tories. It's near to the worst case scenario, and the bottom end of expectations for the end of the year post-sleaze for the Tories, that I mentioned around the Patterson time.
Like I said yesterday, there’s two scientific ways of looking at it. Both are right, just question of degree and weighting. Sure governments been double digit behind mid terms come back to win, and you have (no need to name them) PBers trawling over polls and sub samples for upticks to support that argument. But on the other hand, can’t remember ant and Dec and darts sing song or everyone in country calling Cameron lazy liar bastard I hate him, for example, so I am sure makes this different.