"Elizabeth Holmes - once one of Silicon Valley’s superstar CEOs - sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors with blood-testing start-up"
Seems incredible how long a fraud can keep going when the product doesn't work.
Next up: fusion power generation
Except that actually works.
Plenty of the projects getting funding certainly won't. Some might.
They’ve already demonstrated that fusion power can produce energy. Quite a difference from the Theranos scam.
Edit: Theranos, not Thanos.
It was demonstrated by the first H-bomb 70 years ago that fusion power can produce energy. But nobody has yet worked out how to use fusion energy to run a power station at all, let alone a commercially viable one. Most of what you read about commercial fusion power is somewhere between very wishful thinking and outright scam.
They’ve already demonstrated a design that is a net producer of energy, even if only for a brief period. To call it a scam is absurd conspiracy nonsense.
That is simply wrong. No fusion device has yet achieved energy breakeven, though JET ( which I once worked on as a young plasma physicist) has come closest. And even that would be miles away from commercial power generation. But feel free to invest if you like.
What absolute poppycock. Almost all the energy we use comes from fusion, albeit sometimes in a slightly tortuous way.
I’ve developed a vibrator that runs by harnessing neutrinos from the sun, so it never runs out of power. Am I going to be rich, or just remain very happy? 😇
If you live in the UK, neither.
About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
The uks problems are deep. This is Peston saying half a million people have dropped out of the wirkforce since 2019. Big rise in long term sickness in those aged 16 to 34
Many people have realised just how damaging to their relationships and own psychology a lot of work is. The nonsense of the New Right of the 1970's of the "dignity of all work" has been broken , and you're not going to easily reverse that. It may be better to accept that increasing automation will also be a factor, and to also encourage people who are in a position to to do creative and socially beneficial things with their time, as many hoped for the "creative society" of the 1960s.
Many low-end jobs that people are absent from have also contributed relatively little to our economies or society ; this isn't to say we can abandon work on a large scale as yet, or function without large numbers of people working, but we may need to start to think a little differently about what that will entail.
Dignity of work is only true in some top end jobs. Ask a sewage worker about the dignity of his work
This isn't going to help productivity at the top end....why take the £100k+ a year job, instead ask for £90k a year and do 4 days a week.
The uks problems are deep. This is Peston saying half a million people have dropped out of the wirkforce since 2019. Big rise in long term sickness in those aged 16 to 34
Its happened in the usa too where they are complaining of the same problems...rise in sickness and people unwilling to work
The long-term sickness soundbite is one that various Euro type commentators have been pushing for a bit. Up to and including 'crippling the UK economy'. I think it's overegged, as our workforce participation is still high compared to our peers, and half a million is a small percentage.
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't really follow people who do politics, but what I have just found it full of people saying they are leaving to Mastadon, before carrying on using twitter. I think more people are smackhead level addicted to it then they realise.
The vast majority of those that I follow who are setting up such accounts are doing so merely as insurance. Twitter will likely carry on in something approximating it's existing form, but there's a not insignificant chance it doesn't.
Zelensky says 10 million ukrainians currently without power. Bear in mind its snowing and freezing in kyiv now
Over 10 million Ukrainians are currently without electricity. These are record breaking blackouts. Kiev, Sumy, Odessa, Vinnytsia are completely without power. We are call on our partners to close Ukrainian sky as soon as possible and provide us with more AD systems." - Zelensky.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't really follow people who do politics, but what I have just found it full of people saying they are leaving to Mastadon, before carrying on using twitter. I think more people are smackhead level addicted to it then they realise.
The vast majority of those that I follow who are setting up such accounts are doing so merely as insurance. Twitter will likely carry on in something approximating it's existing form, but there's a not insignificant chance it doesn't.
There is certainly that too. But, I follow mostly academics / tech people a not insignificant proportion of whom were making a big deal of leaving only to carry on tweeting.
The Woke provincial bookshop may be a front for money laundering. Seriously
We had a Russian pie shop on Parkway, in Camden, that lasted three years, and had maybe three customers in that time. At first I couldn’t work out why and how it survived. Then I realised. Ah
Apparently some of the empty “Turkish barbershops” do the same job for Albanian money. And of course the candy stores
If I was going to wash drugs money, a Woke Bookshop in, say, Hove would be ideal. The last place you’d suspect
I wondered the same about the flint knapping trade.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Was on a university campus last week, was rather taken aback by surprising number of those wearing masks (not just Asian students) OUTSIDE.....
The Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry was running ads in the summer saying, "you know what, you really don't need to wear a mask outside". People didn't take any notice. I guess part of it is that it's still considered polite to wear them inside for pandemic-related reasons, which fits with the tradition of wearing a mask if you've got a bit of a cold, and it's a pain in the arse to keep taking them off. Also the air is dry here in winter, and there's the hayfever pollen in the spring, so a lot of people would have wanted to wear them much of the time anyhow.
A while back someone (I think it was Naomi Wu) was suggesting there might be a difference in how comfortable it is to wear a mask depending on your nose shape, which might be right (or it might be total bollocks, I'm not sure).
The worst thing (and there were many bad things) about the autumn statement was the total lack of hope. Of sunlit uplands, to coin a phrase. It was all hideously depressing
You can’t run a country like that. People give up or leave
For all Boris’s many faults, he understood that basic political fact. He always sugared a pill and offered a dose of optimism at the end
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Was on a university campus last week, was rather taken aback by surprising number of those wearing masks (not just Asian students) OUTSIDE.....
The Health and Welfare Ministry was running ads in the summer saying, "you know what, you really don't need to wear a mask outside". People didn't take any notice. I guess part of it is that it's still considered polite to wear them inside for pandemic-related reasons, which fits with the tradition of wearing a mask if you've got a bit of a cold, and it's a pain in the arse to keep taking them off. Also the air is dry in winter, and there's the hayfever pollen in the spring, so a lot of people would have wanted to wear them anyhow.
A while back someone (I think it was Naomi Wu) was suggesting there might be a difference in how comfortable it is to wear a mask depending on your nose shape, which might be right (or it might be total bollocks, I'm not sure).
I am sure Dr Foxy can back this up, but during pandemic I had a conversation with people higher up about masks for NHS workers in ICU and that was a real issue in trying to find masks that properly fitted different face types. Some hospitals had say 3-4 options and people had to go and get a "fitting" to determine which was appropriate for them. But there were a not insignificant numbers of people for whom the option was none of the above.
This is the most interesting local politics thing I have seen this week - Croydon Council sending the lawyers in against a blogger who reported on Reports on Doings In Croydon Council that they had published on their own website (allegedly in error).
It's like it was 2008.
All to do with a possible waste of £30m or £40m ish, and reports thereinto.
The Croydon Council Head of Legal pleaded that he could not make the Court Hearing physically as the tubes were on strike.
Lawrence-Orumwense had emailed in, saying that he could not get from Croydon to the Strand because there was a strike on the Underground. No one made mention of the complete absence of Tube stations in Croydon…
(You go overground or by bus, or get a taxi if the poor bloody taxpayers are funding it.)
The judge observed the stable door/ horse bolted truth that pleading confidentiality was a bit of a stretch as umpteen thousand people could have seen it, and hoofed them out of the interim hearing in his Court with a size 11 boot print on their backside, plus a promise from the blogger not to further publish until the main hearing was held.
If they are using a standard council system they won't be able to evidence how many people accessed or viewed the documents unwittingly published, but even exempt information should only be withheld if the public interest in doing so it outweighs the public interest in disclosing it. Given how publicly available it had already been, an injunction would have been pointless.
Sounds like their monitoring officer is incompetent from their communications to the editor as well.
It's in the piece linked. The Council were trying to injunct previous publication afaics, and the blogger supplied traffic data. Here's an extract.
(The Inside Croydon blogger is one of the early ultra-local survivors, so knows his stuff.)
He invited Lewin to make his opening remarks. My notes, I have to admit, are a little sketchier than if I were simply observing procedures. But Lewin began talking about “non-disclosure”, and “confidential reports”.
And then he said something about “published accidentally as long ago as September”.
Oh.
Judge Nicklin seized on this point. “I rather think that the documents have lost their confidentiality, don’t you?” the judge said, peering across the empty courtroom at Lewin.
The Judge asked Lewin how many times the documents had been accessed or downloaded in the month and a half they had been freely available via the website of Croydon Council. “I haven’t got evidence to demonstrate that today,” Lewin said, sounding a little crest-fallen. He’d not done his homework.
Judge Nicklin, however, had. “It seems to me that you’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle,” he said. I’d barely had to say two words so far.
Judge Nicklin had checked out Inside Croydon. He’d seen that we have nearly 20,000 people signed up to receive alerts when we publish content, and that we have had 16million page views. And he’d even found that we have 15,000 followers on Twitter. Our ad manager, if we had one, would be a big fan of Judge Nicklin.
“It’s a bit of a stretch,” the judge said, addressing Lewin, “that you can keep a secret which has been seen by 16,000 people.”
Lewin was definitely crest-fallen now. I’m sure I heard him say something along the lines of, “The horse has bolted, m’lud.”
Daft - and now the case has been dropped, I see. Bit of a sting in the tail, carefully avoided by Mr Blogger.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Was on a university campus last week, was rather taken aback by surprising number of those wearing masks (not just Asian students) OUTSIDE.....
The Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry was running ads in the summer saying, "you know what, you really don't need to wear a mask outside". People didn't take any notice. I guess part of it is that it's still considered polite to wear them inside for pandemic-related reasons, which fits with the tradition of wearing a mask if you've got a bit of a cold, and it's a pain in the arse to keep taking them off. Also the air is dry here in winter, and there's the hayfever pollen in the spring, so a lot of people would have wanted to wear them much of the time anyhow.
A while back someone (I think it was Naomi Wu) was suggesting there might be a difference in how comfortable it is to wear a mask depending on your nose shape, which might be right (or it might be total bollocks, I'm not sure).
Do they not realise how insanely bleak it looks to outsiders? This is really not normal human behaviour. Covering your face so your mouth cant be seen is mad. It’s also really bad for tiny kids and deaf people
Zelensky says 10 million ukrainians currently without power. Bear in mind its snowing and freezing in kyiv now
Over 10 million Ukrainians are currently without electricity. These are record breaking blackouts. Kiev, Sumy, Odessa, Vinnytsia are completely without power. We are call on our partners to close Ukrainian sky as soon as possible and provide us with more AD systems." - Zelensky.
LOL, did No.10 think that raising taxes, including a 12p raise in fuel duty that the Chancellor forgot to mention at the dispatch box for some reason, would go down well with the papers and with voters?
The MPs I have no sympathy, after they rejected the more radical option given to them by the membership, in favour of a leader then knew would be up for managed delicinism.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Was on a university campus last week, was rather taken aback by surprising number of those wearing masks (not just Asian students) OUTSIDE.....
The Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry was running ads in the summer saying, "you know what, you really don't need to wear a mask outside". People didn't take any notice. I guess part of it is that it's still considered polite to wear them inside for pandemic-related reasons, which fits with the tradition of wearing a mask if you've got a bit of a cold, and it's a pain in the arse to keep taking them off. Also the air is dry here in winter, and there's the hayfever pollen in the spring, so a lot of people would have wanted to wear them much of the time anyhow.
A while back someone (I think it was Naomi Wu) was suggesting there might be a difference in how comfortable it is to wear a mask depending on your nose shape, which might be right (or it might be total bollocks, I'm not sure).
Do they not realise how insanely bleak it looks to outsiders? This is really not normal human behaviour. Covering your face so your mouth cant be seen is mad. It’s also really bad for tiny kids and deaf people
They are very conformist countries by nature though
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Was on a university campus last week, was rather taken aback by surprising number of those wearing masks (not just Asian students) OUTSIDE.....
The Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry was running ads in the summer saying, "you know what, you really don't need to wear a mask outside". People didn't take any notice. I guess part of it is that it's still considered polite to wear them inside for pandemic-related reasons, which fits with the tradition of wearing a mask if you've got a bit of a cold, and it's a pain in the arse to keep taking them off. Also the air is dry here in winter, and there's the hayfever pollen in the spring, so a lot of people would have wanted to wear them much of the time anyhow.
A while back someone (I think it was Naomi Wu) was suggesting there might be a difference in how comfortable it is to wear a mask depending on your nose shape, which might be right (or it might be total bollocks, I'm not sure).
Do they not realise how insanely bleak it looks to outsiders? This is really not normal human behaviour. Covering your face so your mouth cant be seen is mad. It’s also really bad for tiny kids and deaf people
I don't think they care how it looks to outsiders? Do you care how you look to people in Japan?
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
No. This one is a polemic. It is designed to be a rant and a whinge. And it is beautifully written
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't really follow people who do politics, but what I have just found it full of people saying they are leaving to Mastadon, before carrying on using twitter. I think more people are smackhead level addicted to it then they realise.
There’s a lot of people saying they’re leaving Twitter for Mastadon, finding out for the first time what a truly un-moderated experience looks like, then quickly heading back to Twitter.
Most of the Mastadon servers apparently make 4chan seem like an inclusive and welcoming place for outsiders. There’s a couple that are tightly moderated, but very woke echo-chamber all agreeing furiously with each other.
Picking the wrong servers??? You choose the server, the server chooses who and what it moderates, including which other servers it'll pull from. My experience has been totally lacking in trolling and toxicity, but apart from that I quite like it.
Also there's no algorithm promoting stuff and shoving it into your timeline, so your experience depends a lot more on who you follow, like Twitter used to be back in the old days.
lol at the weirdo on Mastodon
Lol at the weirdo who finds Spectator 'pieces' brilliant.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
The big problem for those opposed to HS2 is that there is a chronic need for more capacity on the West Coast main line. Its main problem is its name which sounds like a vanity project.
So much work is already underway on HS2 [near where I live for instance] that it would be ridiculous to cancel it. Some politicians don't seem to understand that, perhaps because they don't live near it and don't visit those areas.
People get het up about the supposed speed increases from HS2 ( a scant few minutes). But I was under the impression that some of the benefits are freeing up more line capacity for freight etc. Besides, all those working on the line are getting paid, then taxed and spending the money into the economy. That’s a good thing.
At the moment there are roughly 16 trains per hour (tph) on the WCML which is mostly four tracked. This is because it is a curious mixture of fast, semi-fast, stopping and freight trains. It is the busiest and most congested mixed-rail line in the whole of Europe.
HS2 on its own has a theoretical capacity of 14tph. All running at the same speed, so it's easy to have consistent distances between them. I suspect in practice it will be about 10-11 trains per hour, but that's still a pretty impressive record set against a mixed-use line with twice the number of tracks.*
This also means the WCML now doesn't have so many fast expresses thundering up and down it - every one of those removed frees up roughly two pathways for slower services, partly due to pathing and partly due to the increased capacity at stations (Curzon Street may be a 500 yard walk/tram ride from New Street, but opening it will triple the latter's capacity, which is sorely needed).
Estimated increase in traffic - from 16 to 32tph.
I've seen estimates suggesting the overall number of tph will go from 16 to 52. That strikes me as optimistic but it's not ridiculous to think it will be over 40 in total.
More than a doubling of capacity, with only a 50% increase in track space, with far less disruption and far more cheaply than trying to upgrade an existing line.
If I'm honest, this is not only a no-brainer but the big mistake was not building it 25 years ago instead of getting sidetracked by widening the WCML. Which not only took far longer but was more costly than building a high speed line would have been.
*It will actually be quite a bit faster than the WCML as well - about half an hour shaved off the time to Birmingham, more to Manchester - because if you build a new line, why not make it high speed? (Whether it needs to be quite as fast as it's being planned to be is another question.)
How much money might be saved by reducing the top speed ? I had read that a small compromise there might have seen substantial savings, but I've no substantive knowledge about that.
Very little is saved by reducing the speed
And the cost is due to hs2 west being absolutely gold plated both in the way things are being built and in the desire for all risk and plausible cost over runs being built into the original budget
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
No. This one is a polemic. It is designed to be a rant and a whinge. And it is beautifully written
Agreed. It is a great article. Surprising take for the Speccie too - credit to them.
The Woke provincial bookshop may be a front for money laundering. Seriously
We had a Russian pie shop on Parkway, in Camden, that lasted three years, and had maybe three customers in that time. At first I couldn’t work out why and how it survived. Then I realised. Ah
Apparently some of the empty “Turkish barbershops” do the same job for Albanian money. And of course the candy stores
If I was going to wash drugs money, a Woke Bookshop in, say, Hove would be ideal. The last place you’d suspect
Doubt it on the bookshop (which sounds authentic and great) but, yes, in London it's amazing how many of these 'front' places you can spot if you have an eye for it. Businesses not even trying to attract customers, in many cases designed to actively repel, because what they are for is laundering the proceeds of vice. This hidden economy is absolutely huge - but it's largely outside GDP and Fiscal Corner.
Once went into a mobile phone shop in Harlem. Had a long and pleasant chat with the guy behind the counter whilst a number of interesting customers drifted in and out.
I couldn't help but think I was the first person in years to try and buy a phone there.
If you are an irredeemable complete and utter twat, it seems your careers officer will point you in the direction of Number 10. "They will give you a job", he will say, cheerily.
All these thoughts of MPs are froth. It's a fact of life that any MP or pundit can take any one budgetary measure and say it should be different - that's fine, and is the retail stuff of politics.
To attack any budget with meaning, as opposed to politically, you have to do the harder work of setting out a whole alternative with bottom lines of:
How much tax take in total Ditto expenditure Ditto borrowing Reasoned predictions for the next few years that markets will accept to some extent.
A few weeks ago we had a statement from someone whom was CoE for about a week making major changes without setting out (and without the OBR ditto) those things.
How did that go I wonder?
Has anyone set out a costed alternative programme? Has JRM? Baker? ERG? Labour have not. The rest is playground stuff.
LOL, did No.10 think that raising taxes, including a 12p raise in fuel duty that the Chancellor forgot to mention at the dispatch box for some reason, would go down well with the papers and with voters?
The MPs I have no sympathy, after they rejected the more radical option given to them by the membership, in favour of a leader then knew would be up for managed delicinism.
Not necessarily managed declinism but even that would be better than sheer idiocy.
They'll be a rebellion in the Tory party within the next 2 weeks my sources have told me, Sunak and Hunt have moved so far from the conservative party values, the true Torys have had enough, this is what they've been waiting for.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Was on a university campus last week, was rather taken aback by surprising number of those wearing masks (not just Asian students) OUTSIDE.....
The Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry was running ads in the summer saying, "you know what, you really don't need to wear a mask outside". People didn't take any notice. I guess part of it is that it's still considered polite to wear them inside for pandemic-related reasons, which fits with the tradition of wearing a mask if you've got a bit of a cold, and it's a pain in the arse to keep taking them off. Also the air is dry here in winter, and there's the hayfever pollen in the spring, so a lot of people would have wanted to wear them much of the time anyhow.
A while back someone (I think it was Naomi Wu) was suggesting there might be a difference in how comfortable it is to wear a mask depending on your nose shape, which might be right (or it might be total bollocks, I'm not sure).
Do they not realise how insanely bleak it looks to outsiders? This is really not normal human behaviour. Covering your face so your mouth cant be seen is mad. It’s also really bad for tiny kids and deaf people
I don't think they care how it looks to outsiders? Do you care how you look to people in Japan?
I don’t mean they should be fussed about opinions of them on the borders of Primrose Hill, I mean the fact that they are doing something so strange to normal humans, and so socially damaging. Because hiding most of your face - cancelling smiles - is deeply weird and not at all good
And all this for a virus which is now about as deadly as bad flu and for which there are vaccines and antivirals
I see that Fifa president Gianni Infantino has accused the West of "hypocrisy" in its reporting about Qatar's human rights record on the eve of the World Cup.
He opened his news conference by speaking for an hour, telling journalists that he knew what it felt like to be discriminated against, saying he was bullied as a child for having red hair and freckles.
“Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker,” he said, in front of a stunned audience.
They'll be a rebellion in the Tory party within the next 2 weeks my sources have told me, Sunak and Hunt have moved so far from the conservative party values, the true Torys have had enough, this is what they've been waiting for.
This is the most interesting local politics thing I have seen this week - Croydon Council sending the lawyers in against a blogger who reported on Reports on Doings In Croydon Council that they had published on their own website (allegedly in error).
It's like it was 2008.
All to do with a possible waste of £30m or £40m ish, and reports thereinto.
The Croydon Council Head of Legal pleaded that he could not make the Court Hearing physically as the tubes were on strike.
Lawrence-Orumwense had emailed in, saying that he could not get from Croydon to the Strand because there was a strike on the Underground. No one made mention of the complete absence of Tube stations in Croydon…
(You go overground or by bus, or get a taxi if the poor bloody taxpayers are funding it.)
The judge observed the stable door/ horse bolted truth that pleading confidentiality was a bit of a stretch as umpteen thousand people could have seen it, and hoofed them out of the interim hearing in his Court with a size 11 boot print on their backside, plus a promise from the blogger not to further publish until the main hearing was held.
If they are using a standard council system they won't be able to evidence how many people accessed or viewed the documents unwittingly published, but even exempt information should only be withheld if the public interest in doing so it outweighs the public interest in disclosing it. Given how publicly available it had already been, an injunction would have been pointless.
Sounds like their monitoring officer is incompetent from their communications to the editor as well.
It's in the piece linked. The Council were trying to injunct previous publication afaics, and the blogger supplied traffic data. Here's an extract.
(The Inside Croydon blogger is one of the early ultra-local survivors, so knows his stuff.)
He invited Lewin to make his opening remarks. My notes, I have to admit, are a little sketchier than if I were simply observing procedures. But Lewin began talking about “non-disclosure”, and “confidential reports”.
And then he said something about “published accidentally as long ago as September”.
Oh.
Judge Nicklin seized on this point. “I rather think that the documents have lost their confidentiality, don’t you?” the judge said, peering across the empty courtroom at Lewin.
The Judge asked Lewin how many times the documents had been accessed or downloaded in the month and a half they had been freely available via the website of Croydon Council. “I haven’t got evidence to demonstrate that today,” Lewin said, sounding a little crest-fallen. He’d not done his homework.
Judge Nicklin, however, had. “It seems to me that you’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle,” he said. I’d barely had to say two words so far.
Judge Nicklin had checked out Inside Croydon. He’d seen that we have nearly 20,000 people signed up to receive alerts when we publish content, and that we have had 16million page views. And he’d even found that we have 15,000 followers on Twitter. Our ad manager, if we had one, would be a big fan of Judge Nicklin.
“It’s a bit of a stretch,” the judge said, addressing Lewin, “that you can keep a secret which has been seen by 16,000 people.”
Lewin was definitely crest-fallen now. I’m sure I heard him say something along the lines of, “The horse has bolted, m’lud.”
Daft - and now the case has been dropped, I see. Bit of a sting in the tail, carefully avoided by Mr Blogger.
I did wonder whether the blogger should have published the entire reports in the time between when he heard rumour that the Council were considering legal action and the time when the first letter arrived.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
No. This one is a polemic. It is designed to be a rant and a whinge. And it is beautifully written
Agreed. It is a great article. Surprising take for the Speccie too - credit to them.
The libertarian liberal right - eg the Spectator - is not at all happy with Sunakhunt. Hunak. Shunt. Them
For a start they have destroyed the Tory party for a decade and maybe a generation. They were the last chance after Truss. Gone now
They'll be a rebellion in the Tory party within the next 2 weeks my sources have told me, Sunak and Hunt have moved so far from the conservative party values, the true Torys have had enough, this is what they've been waiting for.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Was on a university campus last week, was rather taken aback by surprising number of those wearing masks (not just Asian students) OUTSIDE.....
The Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry was running ads in the summer saying, "you know what, you really don't need to wear a mask outside". People didn't take any notice. I guess part of it is that it's still considered polite to wear them inside for pandemic-related reasons, which fits with the tradition of wearing a mask if you've got a bit of a cold, and it's a pain in the arse to keep taking them off. Also the air is dry here in winter, and there's the hayfever pollen in the spring, so a lot of people would have wanted to wear them much of the time anyhow.
A while back someone (I think it was Naomi Wu) was suggesting there might be a difference in how comfortable it is to wear a mask depending on your nose shape, which might be right (or it might be total bollocks, I'm not sure).
Do they not realise how insanely bleak it looks to outsiders? This is really not normal human behaviour. Covering your face so your mouth cant be seen is mad. It’s also really bad for tiny kids and deaf people
I don't think they care how it looks to outsiders? Do you care how you look to people in Japan?
I don’t mean they should be fussed about opinions of them on the borders of Primrose Hill, I mean the fact that they are doing something so strange to normal humans, and so socially damaging. Because hiding most of your face - cancelling smiles - is deeply weird and not at all good
And all this for a virus which is now about as deadly as bad flu and for which there are vaccines and antivirals
IDK, different cultures hide and don't hide different parts of the body at different times, it shocks people who aren't used to it but it seems to work out OK for them. I'm sure it sucks for deaf people but as far as the effect on children goes you'd need actual research to know.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
No. This one is a polemic. It is designed to be a rant and a whinge. And it is beautifully written
Agreed. It is a great article. Surprising take for the Speccie too - credit to them.
It wholly overlooks the fact that most people absolutely love living in the UK, that the world has millions of people who want to join us, that 29% of our (too few) babies are born to foreign born mothers who had the enterprise to join us and that we enjoy immensely moaning and watching C4 News stuff about how children are going to school with no shoes, no breakfast, and that the Foodbanks' shelves are empty because the lawyers and accountants are too poor to buy pasta for them. All overdone rubbish.
I see that Fifa president Gianni Infantino has accused the West of "hypocrisy" in its reporting about Qatar's human rights record on the eve of the World Cup.
He opened his news conference by speaking for an hour, telling journalists that he knew what it felt like to be discriminated against, saying he was bullied as a child for having red hair and freckles.
“Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker,” he said, in front of a stunned audience.
I wonder if he also felt like an Italian?
He claimed he knew what it was like to be a persecuted gay man menaced by prison or death because he was a “ginger in Switzerland”
They'll be a rebellion in the Tory party within the next 2 weeks my sources have told me, Sunak and Hunt have moved so far from the conservative party values, the true Torys have had enough, this is what they've been waiting for.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
No. This one is a polemic. It is designed to be a rant and a whinge. And it is beautifully written
Agreed. It is a great article. Surprising take for the Speccie too - credit to them.
The libertarian liberal right - eg the Spectator - is not at all happy with Sunakhunt. Hunak. Shunt. Them
For a start they have destroyed the Tory party for a decade and maybe a generation. They were the last chance after Truss. Gone now
We await the detailed, costed alternatives with interest.
The big problem for those opposed to HS2 is that there is a chronic need for more capacity on the West Coast main line. Its main problem is its name which sounds like a vanity project.
So much work is already underway on HS2 [near where I live for instance] that it would be ridiculous to cancel it. Some politicians don't seem to understand that, perhaps because they don't live near it and don't visit those areas.
People get het up about the supposed speed increases from HS2 ( a scant few minutes). But I was under the impression that some of the benefits are freeing up more line capacity for freight etc. Besides, all those working on the line are getting paid, then taxed and spending the money into the economy. That’s a good thing.
At the moment there are roughly 16 trains per hour (tph) on the WCML which is mostly four tracked. This is because it is a curious mixture of fast, semi-fast, stopping and freight trains. It is the busiest and most congested mixed-rail line in the whole of Europe.
HS2 on its own has a theoretical capacity of 14tph. All running at the same speed, so it's easy to have consistent distances between them. I suspect in practice it will be about 10-11 trains per hour, but that's still a pretty impressive record set against a mixed-use line with twice the number of tracks.*
This also means the WCML now doesn't have so many fast expresses thundering up and down it - every one of those removed frees up roughly two pathways for slower services, partly due to pathing and partly due to the increased capacity at stations (Curzon Street may be a 500 yard walk/tram ride from New Street, but opening it will triple the latter's capacity, which is sorely needed).
Estimated increase in traffic - from 16 to 32tph.
I've seen estimates suggesting the overall number of tph will go from 16 to 52. That strikes me as optimistic but it's not ridiculous to think it will be over 40 in total.
More than a doubling of capacity, with only a 50% increase in track space, with far less disruption and far more cheaply than trying to upgrade an existing line.
If I'm honest, this is not only a no-brainer but the big mistake was not building it 25 years ago instead of getting sidetracked by widening the WCML. Which not only took far longer but was more costly than building a high speed line would have been.
*It will actually be quite a bit faster than the WCML as well - about half an hour shaved off the time to Birmingham, more to Manchester - because if you build a new line, why not make it high speed? (Whether it needs to be quite as fast as it's being planned to be is another question.)
How much money might be saved by reducing the top speed ? I had read that a small compromise there might have seen substantial savings, but I've no substantive knowledge about that.
Very little is saved by reducing the speed
And the cost is due to hs2 west being absolutely gold plated both in the way things are being built and in the desire for all risk and plausible cost over runs being built into the original budget
Hmm. The WC mainline has been upgraded (was it £9.6bn?), and afaik the East Coast mainline has not.
The speed increases from HS2 save a lot more than a "few minutes" - that's all southern commuters from Brum might perceive.
There are plenty of places in the Midlands and North where it makes the difference between a day trip to London, and a half day trip, or the need to stay overnight or not.
Personally I reject the idea that HS2 is a vanity project. Crippling the capacity going NE from Birmingham means the prospect of a major modal shift from air to train between Newcastle, Edinburgh and further North and London in the future has now been lost - so they will stay in their aeroplanes, and goods will stay on the motorway.
Many people have realised just how damaging to their relationships and own psychology a lot of work is. The nonsense of the New Right of the 1970's of the "dignity of all work" has been broken , and you're not going to easily reverse that. It may be better to accept that increasing automation will also be a factor, and to also encourage people who are in a position to to do creative and socially beneficial things with their time, as many hoped for the "creative society" of the 1960s.
Many low-end jobs that people are absent from have also contributed relatively little to our economies or society ; this isn't to say we can abandon work on a large scale as yet, or function without large numbers of people working, but we may need to start to think a little differently about what that will entail.
Dignity of work is only true in some top end jobs. Ask a sewage worker about the dignity of his work
People can have dignity in such work. They aren't treated with dignity much of the time though.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
No. This one is a polemic. It is designed to be a rant and a whinge. And it is beautifully written
Agreed. It is a great article. Surprising take for the Speccie too - credit to them.
The libertarian liberal right - eg the Spectator - is not at all happy with Sunakhunt. Hunak. Shunt. Them
For a start they have destroyed the Tory party for a decade and maybe a generation. They were the last chance after Truss. Gone now
And that's the question.
Are Sunak and Hunt the people who have destroyed the Conservative Party for the forseeable future, or just the poor sods who were given the parcel just before it exploded? Left to begin the clearup operation and set to get very little thanks for it in their lifetimes?
People are going to be arguing about that for a good while, and the next Conservative victory probably depends on coming up with an agreed and convincing answer.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
No. This one is a polemic. It is designed to be a rant and a whinge. And it is beautifully written
Agreed. It is a great article. Surprising take for the Speccie too - credit to them.
It wholly overlooks the fact that most people absolutely love living in the UK, that the world has millions of people who want to join us, that 29% of our (too few) babies are born to foreign born mothers who had the enterprise to join us and that we enjoy immensely moaning and watching C4 News stuff about how children are going to school with no shoes, no breakfast, and that the Foodbanks' shelves are empty because the lawyers and accountants are too poor to buy pasta for them. All overdone rubbish.
Did you bother to read past the first sentence? The article is not suggesting there's going to be an exodus. The exhortation to the young to leave is clearly just rhetoric; the thrust of the article is a condemnation of the continued pandering to (my) boomer generation by the Tories.
And as such it is an extremely important and valid point, beautifully made.
I see that Fifa president Gianni Infantino has accused the West of "hypocrisy" in its reporting about Qatar's human rights record on the eve of the World Cup.
He opened his news conference by speaking for an hour, telling journalists that he knew what it felt like to be discriminated against, saying he was bullied as a child for having red hair and freckles.
“Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker,” he said, in front of a stunned audience.
I wonder if he also felt like an Italian?
Apparently Europeans should still feel guilty over their Empires and apologise to the world for the next 3000 years he said before lecturing Qatar
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
No. This one is a polemic. It is designed to be a rant and a whinge. And it is beautifully written
I can hear ranting and whingeing better than that by going to the high street and queueing at the butcher's. What is needed is truly informed critique. Rod Liddle is there to do the other stuff.
I see that Fifa president Gianni Infantino has accused the West of "hypocrisy" in its reporting about Qatar's human rights record on the eve of the World Cup.
He opened his news conference by speaking for an hour, telling journalists that he knew what it felt like to be discriminated against, saying he was bullied as a child for having red hair and freckles.
“Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker,” he said, in front of a stunned audience.
I wonder if he also felt like an Italian?
He claimed he knew what it was like to be a persecuted gay man menaced by prison or death because he was a “ginger in Switzerland”
What a twat. Way to make it all worse
You'd think that in view of Fifa's history and reputation its President would just stfu and pray that the whole shabang passes off without mishap or scandal.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
No. This one is a polemic. It is designed to be a rant and a whinge. And it is beautifully written
Agreed. It is a great article. Surprising take for the Speccie too - credit to them.
The libertarian liberal right - eg the Spectator - is not at all happy with Sunakhunt. Hunak. Shunt. Them
For a start they have destroyed the Tory party for a decade and maybe a generation. They were the last chance after Truss. Gone now
There was never going to be a further chance for the Tories after may-impress-on-the-upside Truss tbf.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
No. This one is a polemic. It is designed to be a rant and a whinge. And it is beautifully written
Agreed. It is a great article. Surprising take for the Speccie too - credit to them.
The libertarian liberal right - eg the Spectator - is not at all happy with Sunakhunt. Hunak. Shunt. Them
For a start they have destroyed the Tory party for a decade and maybe a generation. They were the last chance after Truss. Gone now
Depends on how Labour handles the economy, if PM Starmer and Reeves lead to further high inflation, high tax, austerity and even more strikes the Tories will see a quick revival.
If however they manage the economy reasonably well like New Labour did then the Tories will likely be out for a decade or more, however Major and Clarke left a sound economic legacy in 1997
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Was on a university campus last week, was rather taken aback by surprising number of those wearing masks (not just Asian students) OUTSIDE.....
The Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry was running ads in the summer saying, "you know what, you really don't need to wear a mask outside". People didn't take any notice. I guess part of it is that it's still considered polite to wear them inside for pandemic-related reasons, which fits with the tradition of wearing a mask if you've got a bit of a cold, and it's a pain in the arse to keep taking them off. Also the air is dry here in winter, and there's the hayfever pollen in the spring, so a lot of people would have wanted to wear them much of the time anyhow.
A while back someone (I think it was Naomi Wu) was suggesting there might be a difference in how comfortable it is to wear a mask depending on your nose shape, which might be right (or it might be total bollocks, I'm not sure).
Do they not realise how insanely bleak it looks to outsiders? This is really not normal human behaviour. Covering your face so your mouth cant be seen is mad. It’s also really bad for tiny kids and deaf people
I don't think they care how it looks to outsiders? Do you care how you look to people in Japan?
I don’t mean they should be fussed about opinions of them on the borders of Primrose Hill, I mean the fact that they are doing something so strange to normal humans, and so socially damaging. Because hiding most of your face - cancelling smiles - is deeply weird and not at all good
And all this for a virus which is now about as deadly as bad flu and for which there are vaccines and antivirals
IDK, different cultures hide and don't hide different parts of the body at different times, it shocks people who aren't used to it but it seems to work out OK for them. I'm sure it sucks for deaf people but as far as the effect on children goes you'd need actual research to know.
But I’ve BEEN to Japan and Korea. Also China, Taiwan, Thailand etc. They didn’t do this in the past. You’d see the odd person wearing a mask - because they had a cold or whatever - that’s sensible
But all of society wearing masks all of the time is lunatic. And self harming. In one of those guardian photos all the little kids are wearing masks
How will they learn to interact, and read human expressions? And take pleasure in smiles? How will they fancy someone if they can’t see them?
Sadly i think its been a bad week for Zelensky. He jumped the gun on the missile in Poland by saying it was Russian. Hes a good guy but must be careful not to destroy his credibility. You cant play games with ww3.
This from the ft Responding to Zelensky’s remarks tonight, a NATO country diplomat told me: “This is getting ridiculous. The Ukrainians are destroying [our] confidence in them. Nobody is blaming Ukraine and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”
Careful now. If you don't think Zelensky trying to bullshit us into WW3 last week was a great idea you'll get an unlubed pineapple up your dumper on your way to a ban.
You certainly lead by example in being entirely careful with what you claim others say, or use of adolescent talk of Disney princes and not being surprised people think you are jesting not making serious points.
LOL, did No.10 think that raising taxes, including a 12p raise in fuel duty that the Chancellor forgot to mention at the dispatch box for some reason, would go down well with the papers and with voters?
The MPs I have no sympathy, after they rejected the more radical option given to them by the membership, in favour of a leader then knew would be up for managed delicinism.
I'm inclined to think of the fuel tax increase (which is a small catchup for the ~12 year cash freeze) as a stalking horse for increasing the tax on electrical cars.
By my reckoning they will need something like £2500 per annum per electrical car to cover the hole left by the end-of-carbon-based-fuel.
It's also noticeable that the changes proposed to electric car tax are post the next election. A time bomb for Mr Starmer.
From the PB Dyspeptic Euro-media Obsessive Correspondent, a very interesting report from France24 on how the French energy mix is under pressure and changing.
Interesting stuff in particular about floating solar on reservoirs.
I see that Fifa president Gianni Infantino has accused the West of "hypocrisy" in its reporting about Qatar's human rights record on the eve of the World Cup.
He opened his news conference by speaking for an hour, telling journalists that he knew what it felt like to be discriminated against, saying he was bullied as a child for having red hair and freckles.
“Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker,” he said, in front of a stunned audience.
I wonder if he also felt like an Italian?
He claimed he knew what it was like to be a persecuted gay man menaced by prison or death because he was a “ginger in Switzerland”
What a twat. Way to make it all worse
You'd think that in view of Fifa's history and reputation its President would just stfu and pray that the whole shabang passes off without mishap or scandal.
He's made a desperate play to change to conversation and stir up the not inconsiderable numbers in the West who do feel guilty about their own societies.
It won't work, because however true it might be that doesn't mean Qatar gets a free pass.
Children are taught two wrongs don't make a right. Fifa is saying if you've done wrong never say anything about others doing wrong, or seek to make things right.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
No. This one is a polemic. It is designed to be a rant and a whinge. And it is beautifully written
Agreed. It is a great article. Surprising take for the Speccie too - credit to them.
The libertarian liberal right - eg the Spectator - is not at all happy with Sunakhunt. Hunak. Shunt. Them
For a start they have destroyed the Tory party for a decade and maybe a generation. They were the last chance after Truss. Gone now
And that's the question.
Are Sunak and Hunt the people who have destroyed the Conservative Party for the forseeable future, or just the poor sods who were given the parcel just before it exploded? Left to begin the clearup operation and set to get very little thanks for it in their lifetimes?
People are going to be arguing about that for a good while, and the next Conservative victory probably depends on coming up with an agreed and convincing answer.
It'll take a second loss before they agree whose fault it was and what approach to take.
If in doubt, assume a party will always first go with the explanation which makes them feel best and requires least change - not their fault, global issues, fake stories like Hunt etc
Had an interesting chat with my left wing friend yesterday. He thought Brexit could well be behind much of our economic malaise but he still supported it even if it would make us poorer. The EU is creating some nasty governments in its member states. We could solve a lot of our problems if we built a more Scandanavian-style state in his view. Introduced some wealth taxes etc.
He was also surprisingly hostile to Starmer. Angry at how he had treated Jeremy Corbyn and how so many of Corbyn's critics refused to directly call him an anti-semite. Why shouldn't people feel strongly about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians?
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Was on a university campus last week, was rather taken aback by surprising number of those wearing masks (not just Asian students) OUTSIDE.....
The Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry was running ads in the summer saying, "you know what, you really don't need to wear a mask outside". People didn't take any notice. I guess part of it is that it's still considered polite to wear them inside for pandemic-related reasons, which fits with the tradition of wearing a mask if you've got a bit of a cold, and it's a pain in the arse to keep taking them off. Also the air is dry here in winter, and there's the hayfever pollen in the spring, so a lot of people would have wanted to wear them much of the time anyhow.
A while back someone (I think it was Naomi Wu) was suggesting there might be a difference in how comfortable it is to wear a mask depending on your nose shape, which might be right (or it might be total bollocks, I'm not sure).
Do they not realise how insanely bleak it looks to outsiders? This is really not normal human behaviour. Covering your face so your mouth cant be seen is mad. It’s also really bad for tiny kids and deaf people
I don't think they care how it looks to outsiders? Do you care how you look to people in Japan?
I don’t mean they should be fussed about opinions of them on the borders of Primrose Hill, I mean the fact that they are doing something so strange to normal humans, and so socially damaging. Because hiding most of your face - cancelling smiles - is deeply weird and not at all good
And all this for a virus which is now about as deadly as bad flu and for which there are vaccines and antivirals
IDK, different cultures hide and don't hide different parts of the body at different times, it shocks people who aren't used to it but it seems to work out OK for them. I'm sure it sucks for deaf people but as far as the effect on children goes you'd need actual research to know.
Might be true, but if there's been a significant change and an uptick that's relevant
They'll be a rebellion in the Tory party within the next 2 weeks my sources have told me, Sunak and Hunt have moved so far from the conservative party values, the true Torys have had enough, this is what they've been waiting for.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Not a great article. Just a general whinge marshalling factoids from anywhere; the sort of journalism which is why I can't be bothered to subscribe the the Speccie at the moment.
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
No. This one is a polemic. It is designed to be a rant and a whinge. And it is beautifully written
Agreed. It is a great article. Surprising take for the Speccie too - credit to them.
The libertarian liberal right - eg the Spectator - is not at all happy with Sunakhunt. Hunak. Shunt. Them
For a start they have destroyed the Tory party for a decade and maybe a generation. They were the last chance after Truss. Gone now
And that's the question.
Are Sunak and Hunt the people who have destroyed the Conservative Party for the forseeable future, or just the poor sods who were given the parcel just before it exploded? Left to begin the clearup operation and set to get very little thanks for it in their lifetimes?
People are going to be arguing about that for a good while, and the next Conservative victory probably depends on coming up with an agreed and convincing answer.
Well I wish all questions were as easy as this. They took over with a recession looming, the public finances in terrible shape, and the party polling around 20%. Not much to destroy there really.
The worst thing (and there were many bad things) about the autumn statement was the total lack of hope. Of sunlit uplands, to coin a phrase. It was all hideously depressing
You can’t run a country like that. People give up or leave
For all Boris’s many faults, he understood that basic political fact. He always sugared a pill and offered a dose of optimism at the end
Hmm, I agree people generally need some hope, but Boris's approach was just bog standard denial of issues with lip service to any problems and a thick layer of booster ism.
If people want to reduce taxes you are going to have to move towards a privatised health system and reform the pensions system. I don't see any other way.
Grow the economy faster than “health care inflation” and population growth, combined?
That’s how we got to the stage of being able to afford the NHS in the first place.
No one has any ideas on how to do that other than wish really hard though.
Start with Heathcare Inflation - which seems to be like military equipment inflation. More each year for the same capability.
From stuff I read up on, concerning testing during lockdown, NHS medical testing, at the backend, is poorly automated and rather put of date in many areas. Which is why results often take a great deal of time to come back. Which can’t be ideal, medically. I’ll bet that costs more money in wrong/delayed treatment. So *invest* there as a start.
The problem with health is we have a vicious combo of more chronic conditions and technological advances. Obesity still hasn't really hit the NHS yet in the way it will over the next 50 years.
As others have pointed out, labour productivity in health grows really slowly too. Hard to replace nurses with tech. It's inherently physical.
The only way we can afford it is large increases in the labour supply. But productivity is growing at only 1%, our demographic profile and working age population is fucked because of low fertility, people are working fewer hours, and participation rates are dropping because (again) chronic conditions.
Our political class has been completely taken by non-workers (landlords and pensioners), so there is no prospect of change. And any attempt to reduce stuff like obesity in a thwarted by an inconsistent approach to policy intervention - it's stupid that we provide universal health care while not doing anything to reduce pressure on it.
It's depressing tbh. I enjoy my work but it gets to me a bit sometimes.
Productivity doesn’t mean replacing nurses with robots. From watching medical staff in hospitals, you can see they have to tons of non healthcare stuff as part of their job.
It is possible that some doctors live to fight their way through multiple conflicting and non working systems to order tests, but I doubt it.
Classically, increases in productivity involve reducing useless work or moving work from expensive specialists to cheaper staff.
For example, I am currently automating flows in middle/back office at a bank. When we are done 99% of the time, a trade will be made. And then not touched by a human. The system will detect problems and flag them for manual intervention.
So the people whose job is fixing issues will have massively less shovelling stuff that is fine and can actually fix issues
And the new people will not have all the simple cases to develop their skills on. Ah well.
Exactly. Clearly @bondegezou would love to toss himself off silly in their to achingly right-on titles, and I suspect @kinabalu would absolutely love it, but most people do not.
It's a small town an option for me to sit in a bookshop with a new bookshop and have a coffee is no longer available.
What will I do? Go to Waterstones or the secondhand bookshop (which sells all the stuff I like) instead, but have my coffees elsewhere.
Not the end of the world. But another example of how this Wokery we're kept being told doesn't exist very much does in the real world.
I suspect "most people" don't buy many books at all, and of the remainder, most of those will buy online, and of the rest, at the big chains like Waterstones. Running an independent bookshop must be a pretty precarious business model these days, and my guess is that to be successful you've pretty much got to either (1) take the "the business is a coffee shop that sells books on the side" approach or (2) have a niche and lean heavily into it. I don't think a small independent generalist has much chance at all.
Now it may well be that this specific shop has mismatched their niche and their location, but at least if they get word out online they can draw their customer base from a wider area than just local passing trade. And they might be able to do some worthwhile online sales too, if they are any good at curation and recommendations for books in their niche.
We’ve got two independent book shops in Sidmouth, but no off licence. That said, me and my wife, both 58, are among the younger inhabitants!
Lots of antique shops though as I remember though havent been there for years, will have to drop over sometime and take a look as the 157 bus goes straight there
If they really did racially abuse these girls then they should be expelled. That's what would happen at my kids' schools, but I suppose as always these people are held to different standards from the rest of us. We have these institutions whose entire purpose is to breed an entitled, out of touch elite and then wonder why we keep being ruled by an entitled, out of touch elite.
I'm all for bashing Eton for this and many other things, but would someone really be expelled for even racial abuse, as a first offence? A suspension and other sanction seems more likely than immediate expulsion.
At our school you can be permanently excluded for a serious breach of the behaviour policy. We don't know enough about this incident to say what happened but it certainly sounds like it might have been in that kind if category, and again we don't know the full facts but it sounds like the kids just got a slap on the wrist. Eton should provide a full account of the incident. Since they educate most of the people who run the country there is a clear public interest in knowing exactly what they're doing, and I'm sure that if they were a state school they would have to provide full disclosure (without providing the children's details, obviously).
That’s very unusual for a state school, if so, as local authorities will try their utmost to prevent it. This is because they have closed if not all at least a large majority of the schools that catered for children who had been expelled so there is nowhere to send them.
I have seen children physically assault staff, threaten sexual violence, be caught selling drugs and racially abusing anyone and everyone and they get a week’s suspension. There were two who had done all these things and it still took three months and a series of court cases to boot them out.
The only actual instant expulsion was for threatening someone with a knife. Even the LEA didn’t try to overrule that one.
Then people wonder why discipline isn’t all it might be.
Our school is pretty tough on this kind of thing. As an academy I'm not sure how much influence the LEA would have, but you're the expert on this, I'm just a parent.
Essentially, the LEA has a statutory duty to educate all children in its area.
If, therefore, they are expelled from schools the LEA has to find a place to put them.
This is bloody difficult as (a) all the schools designed to help these people have been shut because the DfE are cupid stunts and (b) all the schools that the LEA used to be able to order to take pupils whether they liked it or not are now academies and can refuse to take new students at their discretion.
Therefore, if a school expels a child, the LEA will frequently sue through the courts or through tribunals to force them to take them back. If it cannot be proved that they had good cause and had exhausted all procedures, the school will be ordered to take them back whether they like it or not.
So it all boils down, as usual, to the shocking complacency and ineptitude of the adminstration.
Comments
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tax/income-tax/two-million-face-paying-60pc-income-tax/
eg https://www.statista.com/statistics/1258896/inactive-population-in-europe-by-country/
Swedish Stu remarked earlier that all the economic problems in the UK are down to Brexit, and the English are in denial. IIRC.
It's quite remarkable how Brexit has depressed the entire European economy, and COVID and Ukraine have had no effect
Twitter will likely carry on in something approximating it's existing form, but there's a not insignificant chance it doesn't.
Over 10 million Ukrainians are currently without electricity. These are record breaking blackouts. Kiev, Sumy, Odessa, Vinnytsia are completely without power. We are call on our partners to close Ukrainian sky as soon as possible and provide us with more AD systems." - Zelensky.
https://twitter.com/Exusnx/status/1593446475941519360?s=20&t=nEFlfJpdT3N1gGPNoRcf0g
Tory MPs “have no fight left”
Many now planning future careers outside politics
No10 aides shocked at how badly plans landed with papers”
https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1593893778489692161?s=46&t=nzVF10aaKIc9ytU44zHXoA
“Shocked”
A while back someone (I think it was Naomi Wu) was suggesting there might be a difference in how comfortable it is to wear a mask depending on your nose shape, which might be right (or it might be total bollocks, I'm not sure).
Ukraine tells allies it may not be able to recover from more Russian attacks on energy systems | Politico
https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1593141313649577984?s=20&t=nEFlfJpdT3N1gGPNoRcf0g
You can’t run a country like that. People give up or leave
For all Boris’s many faults, he understood that basic political fact. He always sugared a pill and offered a dose of optimism at the end
Proper Speccie articles require: distinctiveness; argument, interesting and reliable facts; a feeling of insider information; style; dealing with the weak points in the argument; optimal solutions; and underlying philosophy.
https://insidecroydon.com/2022/11/18/council-withdraws-high-court-case-against-inside-croydon/
On a related note I wonder how all the newly mobilised Russian troops are going to cope this winter in the trenches?
The MPs I have no sympathy, after they rejected the more radical option given to them by the membership, in favour of a leader then knew would be up for managed delicinism.
And the cost is due to hs2 west being absolutely gold plated both in the way things are being built and in the desire for all risk and plausible cost over runs being built into the original budget
I couldn't help but think I was the first person in years to try and buy a phone there.
To attack any budget with meaning, as opposed to politically, you have to do the harder work of setting out a whole alternative with bottom lines of:
How much tax take in total
Ditto expenditure
Ditto borrowing
Reasoned predictions for the next few years that markets will accept to some extent.
A few weeks ago we had a statement from someone whom was CoE for about a week making major changes without setting out (and without the OBR ditto) those things.
How did that go I wonder?
Has anyone set out a costed alternative programme? Has JRM? Baker? ERG? Labour have not. The rest is playground stuff.
They'll be a rebellion in the Tory party within the next 2 weeks my sources have told me, Sunak and Hunt have moved so far from the conservative party values, the true Torys have had enough, this is what they've been waiting for.
2:39 AM · Nov 19, 2022·Twitter for Android
https://twitter.com/stevesnr50/status/1593796008223592449?s=20&t=nEFlfJpdT3N1gGPNoRcf0g
And all this for a virus which is now about as deadly as bad flu and for which there are vaccines and antivirals
He opened his news conference by speaking for an hour, telling journalists that he knew what it felt like to be discriminated against, saying he was bullied as a child for having red hair and freckles.
“Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker,” he said, in front of a stunned audience.
I wonder if he also felt like an Italian?
Priceless nonsense from the Tories.
I did wonder whether the blogger should have published the entire reports in the time between when he heard rumour that the Council were considering legal action and the time when the first letter arrived.
Published somewhere out of his future control.
But nice to see a good result.
For a start they have destroyed the Tory party for a decade and maybe a generation. They were the last chance after Truss. Gone now
What a twat. Way to make it all worse
The speed increases from HS2 save a lot more than a "few minutes" - that's all southern commuters from Brum might perceive.
There are plenty of places in the Midlands and North where it makes the difference between a day trip to London, and a half day trip, or the need to stay overnight or not.
Personally I reject the idea that HS2 is a vanity project. Crippling the capacity going NE from Birmingham means the prospect of a major modal shift from air to train between Newcastle, Edinburgh and further North and London in the future has now been lost - so they will stay in their aeroplanes, and goods will stay on the motorway.
Are Sunak and Hunt the people who have destroyed the Conservative Party for the forseeable future, or just the poor sods who were given the parcel just before it exploded? Left to begin the clearup operation and set to get very little thanks for it in their lifetimes?
People are going to be arguing about that for a good while, and the next Conservative victory probably depends on coming up with an agreed and convincing answer.
And as such it is an extremely important and valid point, beautifully made.
If however they manage the economy reasonably well like New Labour did then the Tories will likely be out for a decade or more, however Major and Clarke left a sound economic legacy in 1997
But all of society wearing masks all of the time is lunatic. And self harming. In one of those guardian photos all the little kids are wearing masks
How will they learn to interact, and read human expressions? And take pleasure in smiles? How will they fancy someone if they can’t see them?
You don’t need research. This is crazy and bad
By my reckoning they will need something like £2500 per annum per electrical car to cover the hole left by the end-of-carbon-based-fuel.
It's also noticeable that the changes proposed to electric car tax are post the next election. A time bomb for Mr Starmer.
Interesting stuff in particular about floating solar on reservoirs.
https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/down-to-earth/20221118-france-s-energy-mix-in-turmoil
It won't work, because however true it might be that doesn't mean Qatar gets a free pass.
Children are taught two wrongs don't make a right. Fifa is saying if you've done wrong never say anything about others doing wrong, or seek to make things right.
If a child wouldn't buy it it's a shit strategy.
If in doubt, assume a party will always first go with the explanation which makes them feel best and requires least change - not their fault, global issues, fake stories like Hunt etc
He was also surprisingly hostile to Starmer. Angry at how he had treated Jeremy Corbyn and how so many of Corbyn's critics refused to directly call him an anti-semite. Why shouldn't people feel strongly about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians?
Some will vote against, some will grumble or mope, knowing they are headed for opposition, but that's not rebellion.
A lot, is the answer.
Essentially, the LEA has a statutory duty to educate all children in its area.
If, therefore, they are expelled from schools the LEA has to find a place to put them.
This is bloody difficult as (a) all the schools designed to help these people have been shut because the DfE are cupid stunts and (b) all the schools that the LEA used to be able to order to take pupils whether they liked it or not are now academies and can refuse to take new students at their discretion.
Therefore, if a school expels a child, the LEA will frequently sue through the courts or through tribunals to force them to take them back. If it cannot be proved that they had good cause and had exhausted all procedures, the school will be ordered to take them back whether they like it or not.
So it all boils down, as usual, to the shocking complacency and ineptitude of the adminstration.